I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

So really what I am trying to do is create and understand form. But then too, color enters into it because a lot of things are color changes without a value change, which wouldn't show up if you were just using a non-color medium.

There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I need to be fairly straightforward. I'll just try to paint the man, his intelligence, his amiability and his stature, maybe paint him fairly close to humor and try to get it just right.

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses.