Artist

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define.

I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.

Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I've done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.

In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'

I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess.

When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.

My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.

I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.

My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.

Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.

I have a sort of inner sense for scale.

I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.