When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.