I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.
As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.
I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
I tend to like things that already exist.
Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.
One works without thinking how to work.
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.
Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.
Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.
I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.
To me, self-description is a calamity.
What you might consider a bad work can be of extreme interest to an artist in ways which are not about its being a good or bad.
I wish there were more humor in my work than I see in it.
I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'
One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.
I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.
I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.
