During the Eighties, when I was hurting for money, I thought, 'Hang on a minute - I can paint.' I was living in New York and I thought it would get the grocery money coming in, and it escalated from there.
I think that there was a lot of undisclosed money that came into South Dakota, driving a message to paint me as a Washington partisan, which I don't believe that I am, but it was a message that resonated, after pounding it away for a number of weeks.
I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.
Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons...
I was trained as a fine artist. I went to a progressive public school in Pennsylvania that developed these talents, but I was never able to apply to a decent college because I had no math, no science - I was allowed to just paint all day and write.
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.
I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
I have ADD or something. Even when I am doing something, it's me on the computer, I'm painting and I'm writing music. I have to rotate what I'm doing every 15 minutes.
That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than...
I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
I take it very seriously, music. I think it's one of the tools that a director has with which to kind of paint. The right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue.
Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.
Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.
I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.
You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.
But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.
I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.
For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.
I think that's what makes characters interesting - when you paint a person into a corner, and you see what they do to get out of that corner. It's what makes drama drama.
