Quotes

My father thought of Russia as a land of cornfields and happy laughter, and he used to drop copies of The Daily Worker around casually for people to read. Mother was always hissing at him and telling him to pick them up.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.

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. (1988)

The purists think you're going backwards, but I know you'd go forward.

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." How obnoxious! How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way. (2001)

The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely! (2004)

I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.

Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive. And if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

When you see all the smokers outside a building in New York, I just think the building is full of bad-mannered people who haven't thought, "We'll give them a little room to smoke in." That's what a reasonable person, a person with good manners, would do.