It was almost a kind of process of elimination, and that is, that with my work and particularly my early work, it’s almost like the architectural dictum that less is more and in a sense I got down to the subject matter of my work, to its bare bones: the subject is defined by its expression in the word itself. I mean LOVE is purely a skeleton of all that word has meant in all the erotic and religious aspects of the theme and to bring it down to the actual structure of the calligraphy itself is like a skeleton. It’s reducing it to the bare bones. It was really a matter of distillation.
— Robert Indiana
Donald B. Goodall, "Conversations with Robert Indiana," in Robert L. B. Tobin, William Katz, and Donald B. Goodall, Robert Indiana (Austin: University of Texas, 1977), p. 36.