I do work hard at trying to find the right expression for something, which might be like finding the right image - choosing not only the right words but down to the right number of lines. I remember being in Maine once at Colby College with Alex Katz. It houses hundreds of his works. There was a painting of just one seagull against a blue sky. I was admiring it and Alex said, "45 brush strokes exactly."

Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often the time when it looks like anything but.

What most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.

I do work hard at trying to find the right expression for something, which might be like finding the right image - choosing not only the right words but down to the right number of lines. I remember being in Maine once at Colby College with Alex Katz. It houses hundreds of his works. There was a painting of just one seagull against a blue sky. I was admiring it and Alex said, "45 brush strokes exactly."

I was actually dumbfounded by how some artists talked to each other. For example, it was a normal night at a bar, nothing very momentous, when in walked a painter. The other painters at the bar had a bit of an attitude about it. One said to him, "You know, I'm tired of that feeling of hot air coming out from behind your work." And I thought, "Well, that's interesting." I didn't know you could even think something like that, let alone say it right to someone's face.

Art is something someone made. It's a product of human endeavor. As such, it's not that different from having a conversation with someone. The painter is telling us something. Just, how do they - what's their syntax? What's their inflection?

I feel very fortunate to have known James Salter, not very well, but I knew him over the years. Always, people would be talking, talking, talking, and after digging themselves into a deep enough hole, they would turn to Jim and wait for him to utter the single clarifying sentence.