There was very little art in my childhood.

Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.