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Quotes by Artist

"You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare."

"The other work we started in 1992, it is called Over the River, Project for the Arkansas River in the state of Colorado, we haven't got the permit yet. And, we are working at both of those, trying to get the permit. Therefore, we do not know which one will be realized next."

"I think one of the reasons people quit is because they're afraid they won't be able to get better and better; that they have to come to a zenith of some kind."

"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art."

"Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't."

"Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details."


"An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will."


"Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know."

"Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?"

"Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy."

"But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."

"I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring."

"My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made."

"I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall."

"The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course."

"What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart."

"The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying."


"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

"Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different."


"Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted."


"There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

"Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings."

"Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object."

"A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it."


"To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life."


"I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting."


"That was my fear, which is why when I was took over a book, I was always trying to tweak it a little bit so that it looked like I was trying to add something instead of keeping the status quo."
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