Chicago is a wonderful area because it's blessed with a tremendous number of museums of various sorts, not only the Art Institute of Chicago but the Field Museum of Natural History, the Oriental Museum on the south side.

I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.

Eventually we even got to the point where we could disagree with [Bernard Leach]. I mean, when we first went there, gee, I mean, this was a man who had written a book. He was, in a sense, God, and we for the first couple of weeks called him Mr. Leach.

We were working from very exact models and dimensions and weights of clay to make these pots which had been designed some 10 or 12 years previous to our arriving [at Bernard's Leach studio]. And we, being, I guess you would say young, arrogant Americans, thought that we ought to be able to somehow express ourselves a little bit more in the daily work of the pottery.

Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.

When you're young, you think you can do anything, and we thought.

I got drafted into the army and by pure chance was pushed into a silk-screen shop at this camp where I was, because they could not get training posters fast enough out of a central source in Washington, D.C. So they set up their own shop to print training posters: how to dismantle a machine gun, etc.