I'm always careful to say that I changed everything I found.

Judson Church was a very important place because they believed in art. They also took care of drug addicts. Without the Judson, nothing could have happened.

In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.

The sexual is part of everything, and it's highly formalized. I hadn't done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, "Why not the erotic figure?"

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, "I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all."