I'm not interested in popular culture, particularly. I'm not against it, I'm not avoiding it, but I'm not interested in it as a force in life.
Money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art.
I've always liked the fact that galleries are free to visit in New York.
The era of television in which I grew up was much simpler than now. Its conventions were quite transparent and fun to think about. Who could ever remember the plot of those shows?
I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years.
I remember looking at books when I was in high school, but I don't think I really stood in front of a genuine painting or sculpture until I was out of high school.
I love looking at sculpture, but there's some sort of spell that's broken with it.
There's art that I think is pretty silly, but it doesn't get under my skin like it used to.
I've had phases where the compass point seems lost. It can happen for various reasons, among them, that you're trying to do something outside your skill set; your skills have to catch up with the things you see in your head. But it's important to make all of those paintings, even the failed ones.
I'm also interested in something that can happen later in life. In midstream, you can suddenly take what looks like a detour; I'm sure I've taken many detours.
When I was younger I was very opinionated about art. And then, I realized that I kind of recognized this pattern where the things that I was vehemently of pissed off about, I would end up loving them two years later. So I just tried to mellow out. Like there's art that I think is pretty silly, but it doesn't get under my skin like it used to.
I don't really get excited about good things happening to me.
Painting can also be too earnest at times and that's a drag. You don't want to go in that direction either. It should be holistic. It should represent the whole of your personality, I guess, so if somebody is a sincere painter or an ironic painter, then they're just bullshitting the audience and presenting only an idealized version of themselves.
