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Jack Tworkov was interviewed by Steven Kroeter in March 1982, a few months before the opening of a major exhibition of his recent painting at the Guggenheim Museum. This turned out to be the artist's final interview, as he died in September of the same year, and was published in the November 1982 issue of "Art in America" magazine. When asked how he would describe the differences between his earlier work (before the mid-1960s) and his subsequent work, Tworkov answered as follows;

"I have had a complete change in point of view. I wanted to get away from the extremely subjective focus of Abstract-Expresionist painting. I am tired of the artist's agonies, whether in painting or in poetry. Personal feelings of that sort have become less important to me, maybe just a bit boring. I wanted something outside myself, something less subjective.
Now I surround my paintings with a system of limits - limits on the shapes that I use and the way in which I use them. I call this system a diagonal grid. Working within it is for me more creative than working in a completely nihilistic way. The limits impose a kind of order, yet the range of unexpected possibilities is infinite.
I still have to make choices. And to make these choices there is still no guidance except intuition. I am fascinated with the fact that the work has its origin in system, in a given outside myself, yet within it I am able to invent endlessly. In fact, one of the reasons for leaving most of the lines in my paintings - the intersecting verticals, horizontals and diagonals - is so if a person wants to he can see the simplicity of the painting's fundamental structure. How the painting comes from the system. There are actually a lot of things that crop up in my work that I never could have invented without this system. There are forms, shapes and relationships that I never could have imagined. I've been working this way for about ten years, and the possibilities for its development still seem infinite to me. I can imagine incredible change and development if I live another ten years. Even now I can hardly make a painting without seeing how many possibilities there are - if I had the energy, how many variations I could make on it. Not simply for the sake of having variation, but for the sake of carrying the idea forward."