Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.
My paintings are only the ashes of my art
Paintings, like tombstones, will last a good five hundred years, well into twenty or thirty generations.
I was always very. . . impatient about showing my paintings to people.
I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.
And yes, there are things I want to keep, that I like around me - especially when there's very little left. I just want to keep those little bits of reminders of my past. There are certain drawings from the '60s; certain little paintings from the '60s that I keep.
You're trying to make your painting too complicated. Paintings get complicated all by themselves.
The vast amount of time it takes to make my paintings is very challenging. I have so many exciting ideas I would love to bring to a final painting, but my time-consuming technique limits the number of ideas that get to become a painting.
What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.
I kept. . . . returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings. . . That's not quite true!
I have, and do sometimes, work with other media. But there is something about the physical activity and the directness of painting that I find fascinating. I am very attracted to the materiality of paintings and the visual phenomena of hue and value.
The way I paint is similar to rock in that you don't stand around and say, 'Gee, what are they talking about?' Rock is simple, blunt, colorful. Same with my paintings. You don't stand back and wonder what it is. That's Jim Morrison, that's a panda, that's a scene on the West Coast. It's not abstract.
I like to paint paintings that I haven't seen.
The Minimalists are idealist. They want to minimise themselves in favour of the ideal. But I just can't. You see, my paintings are not cool. . . . I'm very careful not to have ideas, because they're inaccurate.
I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.
It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.
There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop.
The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.
I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that.