My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

Realism has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry.

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

If you can see it, and if you know your color, you can paint it.

Dramatic use of color, harmonious design, the interplay of light and shadow across a variety of textures, the portrayal of the figure and other subject matter that reflects the sophistication and beauty I find in nature - all presented from a unique point of view - can only be successfully achieved with a sound command of the painter's craft... history will determine how successful I have been.

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.

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.