When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.
The negative is just as important as the positive.
I'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning 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 did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.
I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.
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've always wanted... I wanted to give people joy.
I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.
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.'
All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.
I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.
I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.
The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.
I have a sort of inner sense for scale.
One of the first drawings I did in Paris - I wasn't thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing - I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring.
My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.
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.
I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess.
