Robert Rauschenberg

I always thought of [my paintings] as being not passive but very hypersensitive, so that any situation they were in one could almost look at the painting and see how many people there were in the room, by the number of shadows cast, or what time of day it was, like a very limited kind of clock.

. . . I didn't want painting to be simply an act of emphasizing one color to do something to another color, like using red to intensify green, because that would imply some subordination of red.

And then I became disturbed [by] the outside assumptions, the prejudices around the colors being black and white . . . The next move was obvious--to pick some other color. So I picked the hardest color I found to work with, which was red.

I was very hesitant to just arbitrarily design forms and select colors that would achieve some preconceived result, because it seemed to me that I didn't have any ideas that would support that.

I had nothing for them [for colors and shapes] to do, so I wasn't going to hire them, I was more interested in working with them than in their working for me.

In one painting I have a brick . . . it tended to look less like a brick because it looked like an architectural form of the particular material, and the only way I was able to let it look as BRICK as possible was to suspend it.