I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it.

For one thing, I want gesture-any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture-gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gesture of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. I've often thought of my paintings as having an axis around which everything revolves.

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

Art has been hijacked by nonartists. It's been taken over by bookkeeping. The whole thing is so corrupt. But I suppose that's okay. For artists, everything is grist for the mill. Artists are like cockroaches; we can't be stamped out.

Every artist returns to things. The drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist, no doubt they crop up again and again.

I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it.