Drawing God

Leonardo drew things to explain them to himself . . . . That's an essential quality of any work of art, the authenticity of the need for understanding. I once told Barney [Newman] a story which he wanted to adopt as the motto for the Abstract Expressionists: A little girl is drawing and her mother asks her what are you drawing? And she says, "I'm drawing god." And the mother says, "How can you draw god when you don't know what he is?" And she says, "That's why I draw him."

-- the artist Hedda Sterne, quoted by Sarah Boxer in "The Last Irascible." New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, 43-45.