A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.
People always say that my work is sensational or shocking but there are truly shocking things you could do, and my sculptures don't go anywhere near that.
What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.
My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.
I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.
Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.
I guess I created LeRoy Neiman. Nobody else told me how to do it. Well, I'm a believer in the theory that the artist is as important as his work.
Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.
Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone's work, I think to myself, 'Gee, I wish I had done that.'
Association with my pupils has kept me young in my work. Criticism of their work has kept my own point of view clear.
When you work at a microscopic level, you have to control every part of your body movement - your fingertips, your joints, the pulse in your fingers.
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
At times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life--at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.
I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age - seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.
And I don't have any specific steps to take because I don't start the same way every time. But there is a knowing when it's enough and you can leave it alone.
The Fur Company may be called the exterminating medium of these wild and almost uninhabitable regions, which cupidity or the love of money alone would induce man to venture into. Where can I now go and find nature undisturbed?
This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else...
But it was great, we sit in the same dressing room where, like, Johnny Cash sat and Willie Nelson and all those guys. That was in itself something amazing - I was on the same space these guys stood on, ya know?
