There's so much going on today. I continually hear, sometimes from artists, that everything's done. It's been done. I fail to see that.

As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work.

I travel a lot, but I don't come away with new inspiration.

All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I've always had a weakness for heroic imagery.

I'd read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: 'I want to be part of that.

I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that... but that's what it did.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.