Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.
Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.
If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out.
Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.
In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.
I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.
I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.
I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.
Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it.
In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.
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