"My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life - if he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas."
"If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being."
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More quotes by Jacob Lawrence
"All artists are constantly looking for something and they don't always know what."
"This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto."
"I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools...I don't see how a history of the United States can be written honestly without including the Negro. I didn't [paint] just as a historical thing, but because I believe these things tie up with the Negro today. We don't have a physical slavery, but an economic slavery. If these people, who were so much worse off than the people today, could conquer their slavery, we can certainly do the same thing....I am not a politician. I'm an artist, just trying to do my part to bring this thing about."
"I would describe my work as expressionist. The expressionist point of view is stressing your own feelings about something."
"You bring to a painting your own experience."