One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.
I have meant what I have done. Or I have often meant what I have done. Or I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or I have tried to mean what I was doing.
I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.
Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn’t know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
I am not strong on perfection.
Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.
The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious – and I do – there’s room for all kinds of possibilities that I don’t know how you prove one way or another.
I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.
I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.
To me, self-description is a calamity.
To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
I’m working in my mind.
I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don’t have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don’t want to work at them. I don’t think my ambition is that strong in that direction.
It’s almost just a difference of mood as to whether I would describe myself one way or the other. I think I share that experience with most people.
I think through living one’s life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It’s a trick of thought.
That’s what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.
Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn’t like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.
Working is very important to me. Probably because as a child I was taught that work was good. I don’t believe it intellectually but I identify with that idea. So it’s probably just like a habit.