The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter – 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.
In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.
I’m poor white trash from the state of Washington.
I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated – and that the most important thing was problem creation.
All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.
Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.
I’m not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work – I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.
I absolutely hate technology, and I’m computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I’m not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.
I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.
Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.
Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.
Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.
I’m plagued with indecision in my life. I can’t figure out what to order in a restaurant.
Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.
There’s something Zen-like about the way I work – it’s like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.
I learned you could suffer a terrible tragedy and still be happy again.
If it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.
I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won’t be able to give much information about who it is.