You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.
You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.
In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'
I was taught to draw very well when I was in school at Boston. And I grew to enjoy drawing so much that I never stopped.
Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
I don't like acrylic because you can't get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint, the surface gets better and richer.
My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.
I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.
I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.
The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.
Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.
I have a book of buildings from 25,000 BC. These are huts built out of mammoth bones. These buildings were beautifully made, from the bones of the body into shelter.
The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.
But if you can find that spot - I suppose it's like running - I used to be a swimmer and swim laps, and you just have to be there with what you're doing.
An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
But I was very, very unhappy because my mother was very charming and generous, but to me, very dominating.
