There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.

There was very little art in my childhood.

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.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.