At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas."

I love Thelonious Monk's song "Just a Gigolo." It's probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I'm mesmerized, because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.