I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn't draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.
I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.
If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.
I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.
The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.
I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.
I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
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.
I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another.In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.
There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.
What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.
There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.
I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine... Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.
I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.
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.
Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.
If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.
I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.
Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they're very narrow.
I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.
