I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.

H.P.Lovecraft could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays.

It's called "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the story [Pickman's Model by H. P. Lovecraft].Certain things about it many people don't realize. Pickman was a real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926. Now, there's a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the margins of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now.

You know, Mick Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil." I think it was inspired by that [H.P.Lovecraft stories]. You don't know who's reading what, you know. It just comes out once in a while in the pop culture.

I would say that it's probably impossible for a lot of people to even think what H.P. Lovecraft's theological state was.

For years [H.P] Lovecraft was defined as an atheist. Well, he wasn't saying anything about what he really was at all. He wasn't even an agnostic. That's exactly what the situation is, in other words, when you enter an eternal realm. You've got to know there is no religion.

Eventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found out about that.