I’m a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.

A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything – as long as they call him something.

Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it’s mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There’s the art of plumbing; there’s the art of almost anything that you can say.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us – glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation – a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

I haven’t the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

I’m not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape – see a pretty place and try to paint it – but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.

My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint – and repaint.

I think of myself as a beginner. Sometimes that’s the whole joy. If you could just do it, there’d be no point in doing it.

If I don’t have anything better to do that day, I’ll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.

As far as I’m concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.