I've always loved those portraits that Alfred Stieglitz did of Georgia O'Keeffe over several years, which really convey the idea that there's not one image that can capture a woman, because we're changing all the time.
I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
I wanted pretty pictures of older women - women who are trying too hard but succeeding - pulling off an extreme look. What I didn't know would creep into the portraits was a vulnerability behind the strong facade that most of them wear.
'Painting like a child' isn't a negative for me... it's something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso's drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.
Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.
I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.
Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model.
