Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think ‘Is this going to be it? Is it the end?’ You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he’s through.
I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man’s art as material either literally or just implying that they’re doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.
Every time I’ve moved, my work has changed radically.
While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.
And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I’ve been here for four years and this is 1965.
Curiosity is the main energy.
It’s so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.
There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism – as though the man and the work were the same – that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.
I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.
So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.
I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.
And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you’re soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.
I’m sure we don’t read old paintings the way they were intended.
And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.
Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.
I wouldn’t use the same color in a picture in more than one place.
The working process is ideally freeing my mind.
By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn’t any fun or need to interest yourself in what you’re doing. And this I find disastrous.