It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life - to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All of your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in art work. All human knowledge is useless in art work. Concepts, relationships, categories, classifications, deductions are distractions of mind that we wish to hold free for inspiration.
There are two parts of the mind. The outer mind that records facts and the inner mind that says 'yes' and 'no'. When you think of something that you should do the inner mind says 'yes' and you feel elated. We call this inspiration.
For an artist this is the only way. There is no help anywhere. He must listen to his own mind. It is the way a way of surrender. He must surrender to his own mind. When you look in your mind, you find it covered with a lot of rubbishy thoughts. You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is telling you to do.
Such work is original work. All other work made from ideas is not inspired and it is not art work ... There is so much written about art that it is mistaken for an intellectual pursuit.
- Agnes Martin in the book Agnes Martin, edited by Frances Morris