All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid. |
And I think, you know, painters drop crumbs along the trail, Hansel and Gretel style, for people to pick up if they want to. |
At the same time that I'm finding the color world I want, I'm also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves. |
Europe often seems sort of overly concerned with the weight of history and stuff. We don't have much history here, so... . |
I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around. |
I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine... most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect. |
I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings. |
I didn't want a model in the room for three or four months. It would drive me crazy, drive them crazy. But also, they gain weight, they lose weight, their hair gets long, they cut it short, they're awake, they're asleep. And a painting becomes the mean average of all those conditions. I simply looked at photography as a way to jot down the information. |
I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is. |
I don't do commissioned portraits and I don't paint college presidents. I can't imagine what kind of ego it would take to want to have a 9-foot-high picture of yourself. |
I love sculpture, and minimal sculpture is really my favorite stuff, but I wasn't very good at it, and I don't think in a three-dimensional way. |
I love what used to be called women's work. When women make quilts or something like that, it was something they could pick up or put down, and go back to after they start dinner or weed the garden or whatever... feed the baby. I like that. I liked knowing where I was going to be for a while. |
I mean, if you think about a writer, you're going to write a novel that takes several months, but there's never a time you're doing anything more than shoving one word up against the next. And clusters of those words make sentences and paragraphs and a chapter. You just try to maintain the same voice and the same attitude so it sounds like the same person wrote the last chapter that wrote the first chapter. |
I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have. |
I tried to, with a series of self-imposed limitations, back myself into my own personal corner where nobody else's answers would fit. I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting. |