There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, What do you think about audience? they would probably say, I don't think about audience, I only think about my work, yet the audience is such an important part.

A precision of composition and figuration is what I'm working toward. I've always felt viewers should have an experience without having to ask what the hell is was about.

Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

Connecting to another is one of the most important things in the world and you can keep expanding that connection - one person, a family, a community, a country, a society, a culture.

The saying the business of art is different than the purpose of art makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

One of the things I love within music and within sports is how often musicians and athletes thank their audience. In the art world, you would never hear that.

Artists of my generation were not educated. We were not given the equipment because it was generally believed to be irrelevant.

If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.

I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.

I think of art as a glue, a cultural and social glue. It's one of the means that has served to show us the things we believe in and the things we celebrate it has served to reinforce our relationship to each other.