I'm really into California art from the '60s. I like a lot of Bay Area artists, like Nathan Oliveira and Bruce Conner.
A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.
Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.
Painting is something that requires a lot of time - it's not just one good idea out of art school.
I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.
This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors.
I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?
Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.
I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.
What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.
Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.
That's the test of street art - to see if anybody stopped. People would cross out ones they didn't like and would star others. I liked that people would engage with them.
I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.
I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show.
I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they act...
