Nothing in the world excites the culture today so much as a question. A question seems very appropriate to whatever you have in mind. Allowing your work to remain questionable is a way of satisfying your cultural condition.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

You have to become complete in some way; a universe - a complete thing in yourself - in order to reach across and breathe some unity onto this thing you're faced with. If you intentionally avoid that unity that is within yourself then you will avoid unity in your work.

Your culture demands that you bring some kind of crisis to your work and therefore you can not bring any unity to it. In order to bring crisis into your work you have to bring it to a state of expectancy. In other words you have to leave your work in the state of mind of being a question.

What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

From the very beginning, art meant something very important to the people who made it. It was a correspondence of the emotions to what you saw; it wasn't knowledge. You were being at one with something eternal; something outside of yourself. And no matter how many fake things have been brought in to suit other conditions... That is still true.