I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that.

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.

If it [talent] isn’t strong enough to take the gaff of real training, then it’s not worth much.

I can’t work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.

I don’t really have studios. I wander around around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.

I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.

I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting… it would be like somebody watching you have sex – painting is that personal to me.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.

It’s all in how you arrange the thing… the careful balance of the design is the motion.

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it … I always want to see the third dimension of something … I want to come alive with the...

To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me.

To have all your life’s work and to have them along the wall, it’s like walking in with no clothes on. It’s terrible.

Her husband, he’s German you know. When her husband came to me, I said, ‘John, you don’t mind me painting your wife.’ And he said, ‘No, that’s fine, just don’t paint her nude.

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I...

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing – then a work of art may happen.