hello, artist speaking

When you get to stamping in public...it's about time to give up portrait painting and sail for Europe.

That force of personality in Beethoven’s music is a result of a once-in-history level of compositional talent coexisting with a once-in-history level of stubbornness (or, to put more positively, idealism). This stubbornness - this refusal to accept things as they are, this will to imagine things as he wishes they were - is the greatest gift that comes from living full-time with Beethoven, and also the greatest source of frustration.

The sun, the moon, the earth and stars are also polka dots. They cannot exist alone. Each and every one of us are polka dots. We gather and weave a beautiful pattern of polka dots.

For me the English draughtsmen are what Dickens is in the sphere of literature. It’s one and the same sentiment, noble and healthy, and something one always comes back to.

Music enables me at particularly difficult moments to open up to this world of possibility and sense of joy. Nothing else gives me that feeling.

It seems to me that if one wants to be a serious artist today and create an original little niche for oneself, or at least ensure that one preserves the highest degree of innocence of character, one must constantly immerse oneself in solitude. There is too much tittle-tattle. It is as if paintings were made, like speculations on the stock market, out of the friction among people eager for gain. All this trading sharpens your mind and falsifies your judgment.

My hands are curious; I am curious. It's unbelievable to someone like me that someone doesn't pick up something to figure out how it works and where did it come from, and wonder who made it and how they made it.

I don't work toward anything...But if someone tells me to walk left, I walk 10 feet right.

I have a roving vision. There are no binoculars that I look through, and I am watching, discovering and thinking and processing.

Taste is the best judge. It is rare.