My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work.

I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.

I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that.

I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man. I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said, "You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well, but somehow you are different." "Ah," he said, "I don't think you should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers."

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.