I said to myself, "If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one."

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."

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.

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.

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

In government they learned their lesson. They don't trust artists anymore. Now the money has to go through arts organizations. But, yeah, back then you could get a grant, and I got $5,000 - a huge amount of money.

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