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.

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

Everybody is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

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.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

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.