I've never read a book on shape. I've read books on gesture; I've read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I've never read a book on what a shape is.

All accidents and experiments, and discoveries, are what my work is about. The problem that I have as an artist is being way too critical.

I'm in this process of trying to create a free space. Like an open field, where figure and ground are in very ambivalent, complex relationships. On top of that, I also wanted to see if I could try to blurt something out, or make something completely immediate, that ends up fitting perfectly.

You can make a beautiful thing, but there's no problem in it. I like the idea of doing a thing, wrecking a thing, questioning a thing to the point where you have pushed it to the edge, and then recuperating it.

Who would be an artist that was perfectly happy? Maybe nowadays, but when I grew up in the '60s, you had nobody in the art club who was popular. No cheerleaders in the art club. I was told that I couldn't be a painter by my first painting teacher. I said I wanted to go to Cooper and be an art student, and he said, "You'll be a waitress." It was really the strangely indifferent parenting.

I've never read a book on shape. I've read books on gesture; I've read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I've never read a book on what a shape is.

A lot of what I do in my work is taking a thing and either washing it off, scraping it, covering it, scraping it and then washing it, turning it upside down. Making it somehow blind.