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.

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

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like crawling back because so many techniques are lost, and so we're going to have a [small] reserve of teachers who can teach the vast number of interested students. We have these poor, hungry, starving people who want to learn something and no place to get it. It's a tragedy.

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

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.