When I was painting portraits and - shall we say? - rather allegorical heads, which is the figurative work which immediately preceded the direction I have since gone, these images were always of a very fixed, rigid quality, and, of course, my work still has this aspect.
I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.
My art is a disciplined high dive - high soar, simultaneous & polychromous, an exaltation of the verbal-visual... my dialogue.
The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.
I didn't think much about Marsden Hartley until very recently, but Gertrude Stein found him to be the best American painter in Europe at the time she was alive. I consider my tributes to him my most important works.
Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.
Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.
There are only two people in 'Eat' - myself and my favorite cat, Pachiki - and for 40 minutes, I eat one mushroom.
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.
