Photographs and reality are just night and day. In reality, the information is all there. A photograph is just kind of a hint.

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

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 I am using a sable, it may start off as an eight or seven, but it's a double aught by the time I'm done. I hate brights... they have no use. You might as well buy a filbert and take the scissors and cut off half of what you paid for.

I try to think and design in color.

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.

I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally putting in music or literally putting in a musical instrument, I use only a hint of the instrument, but the brocaded pattern is like a line of Bach because of its order and the leaves going up are like passages from Vivaldi, and the emphasis on drapery is where the sound comes.