What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Outside is the world; it's there. Pop Art looks out into the world.

I dont have big anxieties. I wish I did. Id be much more interesting.

Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.

A number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse - including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He's such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.

I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn't what I was interested in. All of it had an impact - as did happenings - because I could see that art was changing from expressionism, which I was doing at the time, or thought I was doing. But it wasn't the direction I really wanted to go.

Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.