In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.
Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.
One works without thinking how to work.
The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.
When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant.
My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.
I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.
Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.
One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.
This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.
I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'
I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.
I wish there were more humor in my work than I see in it.
What you might consider a bad work can be of extreme interest to an artist in ways which are not about its being a good or bad.
To me, self-description is a calamity.
