What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.

Some men like to go in for polo, for example, and spend thousands of dollars on ponies. Some go nuts for paintings, and give half a million for a hunk of canvas in a fancy frame. But my passion is baseball.

I've always loved the rustic, slightly worn style of Canvas and that element of an artisanal hand. It's so inherently chic.

This world is but a canvas to our imaginations.

INTO THE WEST takes place during one of the single most dramatic periods in American history. We're painting this on a huge canvas in order to tell a story that explores the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, the wild west and the Indian wars leading to the tragedy at Wounded Knee. These are all facets of the American and Native American experience. It's the story about opportunity and the clash of cultures and the eventual overwhelming of one nation's way of life over another.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land': things that were a little out of style but hadn't reached the point of nostalgia.

You have the clean canvas of a whole week before you. Paint well.

Technically, a makeup artist's canvas is the face and body. The difference is that my painting of makeup is integrated into the painting of the flesh and not on top of it. I think in some ways it is more difficult to expressively deploy makeup.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.