I worried about my ability to draw, but I was much more worried about my ability to paint, to make what I thought was real art. I have to admit that the emphasis on drawing as the introduction to painting seemed to me to be misplaced. For sure, it didnšt fit into my personality profile. I was far too anxious and impatient to prepare or get ready in some way to make a painting. In addition I had a feeling, an intuition of some kind, that in the art world I was growing up in, drawing was getting in the way of painting. I felt that the drive of twentieth-century painting toward abstraction asked for a kind of painting in which painting was freed not only from the shackles of representation but also from the weight of line drawing (outline) and shading (the representation of volume). I imagined pure painting to be free, completely free from drawing.

It wasn't really a bad idea, in fact, it was a rather straightforward ambition, but it was one difficult to realize and, one perhaps, somewhat flawed by definition, if we admit that drawing is a gesture. This concession shows us that it is not the successful illusionism or representation of persons and objects that defines drawing. It is rather the convincing impression of attack (touch), effort and motion that arrests us. If this is the case, pure painting or gestureless art would seem to have had a pretty bleak future.

That's what many had no difficulty saying, and consequently predicting, after they had seen my “black paintings” in 1959. For me, the “black” paintings were simply the beginning of that “bleak” future. That future has turned out to be for me, at least, a surprisingly long and fruitful future, one struggling to overcome the odds against gestureless art, pure painting that could somehow exclude drawing. It shouldn't surprise anyone that after I felt successful enough in excluding drawing that I should succumb to the temptation of including drawing.