speak, abstract. It had no symbolic references. It was a surface that had been utterly painted. But it had not been painted in a way that would suggest the geometrical abstraction that interested me, so it brought about a change. And also that walk to the Japanese restaurant brought about a change in my eyes, and in my relation to art, so that when I left the Willard Gallery exhibition, I was standing at a corner on Madison Avenue waiting for a bus and I happened to look at the pavement, and I noticed that the experience of looking at the pavement was the same as the experience of looking at the Tobey. Exactly the same. The aesthetic enjoyment was just as high. Now this didn’t keep me from buying the Tobey, and painfully buying it. So, you have a change then in my view. Now this change, that was really the result of my involvement with Tobey, naturally opened my eyes to Abstract Expressionism, not to its intentions, but to its appearance. [...]
What you have in the case of Tobey, and in the case of the pavement, and in the case of much Abstract Expressionism, is a surface that in no sense has a center of interest, so that it is truly distinguished from most art, Occidental and Oriental, that we know. The individual is able to look at first one part and then another, and insofar as he can, to experience the whole. But the whole is such a whole that it doesn’t look as if the frame frames it. It looks as if that sort of thing could have continued beyond the frame. It is, in other words, if we were not speaking of painting, but speaking of music [...]. (p. 174/175)

But I was familiar with Tobey, and Pollock’s work looked easy in relation to Tobey’s work which looked far more complex. It was easy to see that, from observing a large canvas of Jackson Pollock’s, he had taken five cans or six cans of paint, had never troubled to vary the color of the paint dripping from the can, and had more or less mechanically - with gesture, however, which he was believing in - let this paint fall out. So the color couldn’t interest me, because it was not changing. Whereas if you look at the Tobey, you see that each stroke has a slightly different white. And if you look at your daily life, you see that it hasn’t been dripped from a can either.
     - But what about the pitch of intensity, the excitement?       
Oh, none of those aspects interested me. They’re precisely the things about Abstract Expressionism that didn’t interest me. I wanted   them to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I’m perfectly happy about my feelings. In fact, I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquillity. I don’t want to disturb my feelings. I don’t want to spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.