At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.
Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
My latest decorating obsession is dipping - like painting the bottom of things. I've done it to almost every terra-cotta pot in my house. Every African vase I have is painted gold on the bottom. It's so fun and easy, and it instantly livens up a piece. You feel like you've really accomplished something.
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.
Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.
All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.
In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about £100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.
I've never felt particularly ambitious or driven, that's for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it's a little doodle, a drawing, a small painting or a movie or a piece of music, so I suppose I'm driven by that. Everything I've done has felt very natural, and it's happened because it's happened.
I'm not painting myself as a down-home, modest guy.
The cafes bore me; going downstairs is a nuisance. Painting and sleeping - that's all there is.
I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient.
I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
After tea it's back to painting - a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often.
I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.
