Artist, Romare Bearden: As a young student, you have a lot of ideas and things to express and I was trying to be very precise in my drawing. And one day, a friend of mine said to me, “Why don't you just let yourself go and draw some of the things that you know about?”
My last work has been around Negro subject matter. I didn't need to worry about trying to make things up. I would just look out the window, you know, it'd be every five minutes, it'd be some happening. In a lot of the things that I have done, like my crowded urban street scenes, there are a lot of people in it and there are a multiplicity of images.
I did small collages the size of a piece of typewriter paper, out of magazine photographs and colored material and blew them up photographically, maybe 4 x 5 foot. Some of the things that underlie my process is a photographic image when it's taken out of its original content and put in a different space can have another meaning entirely.