When you serve your passions, proficiency gradually takes over and becomes habitual.

Artists are supposed to be the ones with imagination. A good part of our job description is to get regular people to use theirs.

When you sit down to paint or draw, you form yourself into a posture of praise

The thing about art is that life is in no danger of being meaningless.

Canned reference is practically always loaded with problems. Photos, for example, contrive to kill imagination and stifle the natural development of creative patterns. While "ready-mades" do show up from time to time, they are rare. Art need not be what is seen-but what is to be seen. "Nature," said James McNeill Whistler, "is usually wrong."

Whatever you do, don't let your system run you.

Our bodies, apart from their brilliant role as drawing exercises, are the temples of our being. Like the bodies of all fauna, they deserve both our study and our appreciation.