I was feeling very, sort of, down about painting for some reason, and without a feeling of a landscape as I talked about before. I was in the south of France and I saw this cypress tree against an ochre wall—and actually it was a chapel wall and way in the distance were the mountains and so on and so forth—and the cypress tree was so black and the ochre wall was a pale, pale ochre and it moved me, so whatever that means. And I started off and that lasted me for a long, long time on, this Cypress series... That's an example of sort of how I work, although it gets translated into something else.”

Joan Mitchell