'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.
You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!
I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don't want to supply too much context.
I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.
Art is more to do with observation than invention.
I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.
The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.
I decided I should use the most obvious colours - the basic colours with simple names: red, purple, yellow, pink. I don't distort the objects, I don't change the objects, I draw them exactly as they are. I do the opposite with the colours.
When I was teaching I often said to students that you are trying to be too creative, don't be too creative, because there is so much already in what you are making, you don't need to do very much. You just need to do a little bit, and that is a lot.
If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.
I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.
If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.
As an artist you are free to use any image, any style, any idea from any culture and any period of history.
I think from an artist's point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.
The viewer brings all additional information to the image.
Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.
You can't force yourself to be something you are not.
If you try to copy something exactly you won't get it correct, because you don't share the same tradition and context.
I have been using the computer as a work aid since the mid-90's. It is extraordinarily well suited to how I think and work and has transformed my practice. Nearly everything I have done in the past 15 years would have been impossible without it. I use the computer for drawing, composing and colour planning everything, from postage stamps to paintings to architectural-scale installations.
The identifying personal association with objects, which are not personal, is an important modern experience - our real association, the strands of our feelings about the objects that surround us. It's also because they are so familiar, we don't think of them as important in the world, but actually they are the world. We are living in a very material world.
If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.
The complexity of the language of images is disguised by the ease and rapidity with which we read them. I've tried to make work that is as transparent and simple as possible. No matter how much I strip away the result is always more complex to me than I expect.
In the late 70's I started to make drawings of the ordinary objects I had been using in my work. Initially I wanted them to be ready-made drawings of the kind of common objects I had always used in my work. I was surprised to discover I couldn't find the simple, neutral drawings I had assumed existed, so I started to make them myself.
I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.
All the basic information should be in the object itself.
