Generally paintings are about technique, but I don't see myself as a painter. I am more of a storyteller and an image - maker.
People used to give me pictures or paintings of me - they never look even close to what I look like.
[My muse] likes to inhabit tea leaves, sunlight filtered through bamboo, melancholy clouds over the Devon coastline, a weedy railroad crossing in the Southern States, bubblegum pop from the sixties, torch songs from the forties, undersea caves where B-movie octopi grapple with men in loincloths, sacred groves of pink anime dryads, Victorian fairy paintings executed by gentlemen in lunatic asylums and so on.
Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.
If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
I look at nature, I see myself. Paintings are mirrors, so is nature.
The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.
Paintings are not like the Internet. They're not like movies. They're not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That's the great thing about them.
I wanted to actually make people look at a painting. We don't look at paintings that much. We glance at them.
For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.
I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.
My work first engaged with the early russian avant-garde; the paintings of moholy-nagy, el lissitzky's 'prouns' and naum gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of kasimir malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design.
Some people have recognized their friends in my paintings, but I'm not directly responsible for any hooking up as far as I know!
Paintings, like dreams, have a life of their own and I have always painted very much the way I dream.
There must be an open space in the paintings - an entry space for the viewer, or even for me. Just white space where you can get into it.
Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer.
I worked like a crazyman. I worked day and night, often days and nights at a time - without sleep. Gallons of coffee kept me awake; the paintings kept me fired up.
The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
