My father would sit and design furniture and cabinets - he was a carpenter and cabinet maker - and I would ask for my own piece of paper and pencil. And when I would say, 'What should I draw?' he would push a cartoon under my nose and say, 'Here, draw this.' So the cartoon became a kind of focus of attention.

To behave creatively in art means behavior with skill; and skill comes from discipline, not derangement. The artist who knows the rules -and proportion is one of them- knows where to bend and how to break them.

I've sold shoes, hawked newspapers, jerked sodas, gazed rapturously at the tinsel dream at the end of a runway from my usher's aisle in a burley-cue, drove a truck - then because I didn't like being pushed around, started pushing a pencil around.

There are three kinds of forms in the human figure: Ovoid forms - egg, ball and barrel masses; Column forms - cylinder, cone; Spatulate forms - box, slab and wedge blocks.

My father would sit and design furniture and cabinets - he was a carpenter and cabinet maker - and I would ask for my own piece of paper and pencil. And when I would say, 'What should I draw?' he would push a cartoon under my nose and say, 'Here, draw this.' So the cartoon became a kind of focus of attention.