There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there

Any artist can't get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you're only interested in what you're doing right now.

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.