The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.
I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I’d prepare the walls – by sanding, etcetera – the way you’d prepare a canvas for painting.
Sometimes people think drawing and painting is mucking about when actually it is a highly skilled activity.
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.
Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn’t leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.
So when I’m playing, I’m sort of painting a feeling in the air.
But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.
I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’
There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there – the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.
Every painting I do blends time frames. The great thing about being an artist is I can make the past join the present in some reality of the future.
Painting was always something I thought I’d do once I retired. But then, about five or six years ago, a good mate passed away suddenly at the age of 50 and it made me realise that if I put off doing stuff until I retire, I might not ever get there.
I paint for the sheer joy of painting. I have never sold any of my paintings. I’d rather give them to people for free.
You’re going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.
I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
Relevance, for me, is about being creative and doing things that you believe in, whether that’s music or acting or painting a picture, or whatever that is.
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.
Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.
And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you’re soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.
Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher’s stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.
When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.
If I’m painting, I paint every day. I’ll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.
