I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral. . . it is a place between heaven and earth.
Artists are like cockroaches; everything is grist for the mill.
I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it.
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
For one thing, I want gesture-any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture-gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gesture of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. I've often thought of my paintings as having an axis around which everything revolves.
Women can also be creative in total isolation. I know excellent women artists who do original work without any response to speak of. Maybe they are used to lack of feedback. Maybe they are tougher.
Every artist returns to things. The drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist, no doubt they crop up again and again.
I think so, too. I know I felt that way. For years. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.
My definition of Man is, a Cooking Animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook. . . . Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats.
No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
I'm raising a daughter. I want to be able to say to her, "You can be anything you want. You can be the President of the United States. " I'd love that.