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.

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.

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.

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.

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