I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

I always knew America was all about guns. You go to the movies as a kid, everybody's got a gun.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.

The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel - the object.