"I love art and I love painting, and I still do it."

"Painting is something that is always changing and expanding. And the only way to evolve is through the act of painting. You can think about it, but it's not the same as being there. So when you return to painting after a break, you start up in a very strange place. It's very discombobulated and takes quite a while to get back into where you are solidly evolving. The thing I find is that I have a long way to go. But it's a great trip."

"What I'm trying to do with each canvas is create a situation in which the paint can be itself, which means letting go of any rationalization. It's important to let ideas blossom without too much judging or interference. The beauty of children is their ability to look at the world openly, without being bound by the intellect. Your intellect can hold back so many wonderful, fantastic things. Without logic or reason, there's always something else, something unseen. The world is infinite rather than finite."

"You go by most paintings, and they don't stop you. You can walk by so much because it's merely beautiful. I like to feel that you could bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to hurt them. I like to feel like I'm painting with my teeth. I call my painting `bad' because bad painting has its own beauty. It's not a designer tapestry or a commercial hype. It makes you react to it."

"My mother refused to give me coloring books, but gave me blank paper and things to draw with. I was never limited by pre-conception, my imagination was never ruined - I was free."

"I remember one in particular: Bushnell Keeler. He was a painter. Until I met him, I thought that Van Gogh was the last man who painted. I was thirteen and lived in the Northwest, so for me there were no painters. When I heard that Bushnell was a painter, and that he did it for a living, I nearly passed out. I became feverish. I didn't want to go to school anymore. It was an awakening. By the time I was a junior in high school, I started renting a room next to his studio. My father payed half the rent which was a super-cool thing for my father to do, because having a studio was not a normal thing."

also see Paintings pages

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