...my art is like prison art... with all the detail... partly, I think because I developed my techniques while working in the press room of the Webb Publishing company... I worked there from 1968 until 1988... my job was to put rolls of paper on a giant printing press that printed telephone books... as the rolls ran down, I would get periods of time from a half hour on up, depending on the press and the paper, to sit and draw or read...  I would sit on an ink can back in the corner and while my coworkers were reading porno mags and getting high, I read ten thousand novels and learned to draw... the printing press was as big as a house and made a huge noise... it was also a place where the air was foul with ink and oil mist and the air was always full of paper dust... the work was hard and heavy but at least one got a break... lots of time to fill and drawing to fill it... now, I am out of the pressroom, but now the world has become my prison and I am drawing to make drawings rather than to get through the shift...

...in art, i always try to be honest... all that means is to just do what i feel... it really is as simple as that... the art is what it is and could not be anything different because it comes purely and honestly from inside of me some place...

...you see, I am very out of sync with american views on a lot of subjects... my endless fascination with naked people, for example... in america we have the notion that without clothes on human beings are being sexual, or at least sexually available... and of course, in societies where people live naked, they do not have any more sex than we have... the puritanical history of america has given us an obsession with sex and to some degree, i suppose that same obsession in me is behind all of my fascination with the nude as a subject for art... however, though my work is sensual, it is seldom sexual...

...it is more about the interest/beauty/connotations of the flesh than about procreation... where most americans only see beauty in 20 something hardbodies, i find the look of people especially naked people endlessly fascinating whatever their age history, gender, etc... and the old master artists understood this, the fascination with the effects of light on flesh, the complex human reactions to seeing images of ourselves in the state in which we are so much the same yet, so much ourselves... 

...back in the late 1960s, I was not a hippy... but somehow, I have more of a hippy philosophy than anybody I know outside of northern california, I guess... but then, I am an uptight and anxious person, so the philsophy comes out in art and fantasy and I live this boring life working at a civil service job and worrying about my bank balance... it is all very confusing and contradictory.... 

...the art selling world is much like the real estate selling world, lots of wankers to deal with and greedy stupid people fucking things up that should be simple and straight forward...

...I try to be modest because 1) I have enough self doubt so that i can conceive that my work is worthless and I am an unimportant artist... artists are notorious for overestimating the quality and importance of their own work... and 2) because I do not want people to think that I am an arrogant asshole and 3) I need to protect my ego from the abuse and rejection involved with being an artist by preparing for the worst case scenario i.e. that my art does not amount to much.... okay, all of that said, it seems to me that my art is very unique... i have never seen anything really like it at all and it does have some virtuoso passages...

...artists working in the old aesthetic, jackson pollack, basquiate, their work is now worth millions of dollars a piece but it is valuable as artifacts created by famous persons, like elvis's shirt, a jackson pollock canvas is cool to see in a museum because it was created by a famous guy... any drip painting would have its own interest there really is nothing special about pollock or any of the others... the education that teaches art professionals that there is something unique about one media piece as opposed to another are playing an emperor's new clothes game

...I have hung onto the paintings and drawings when all other artists are just desperate to sell anything for any price they can get for it... a few hundred dollars does not amount to much today... so, if I sell all of this work and it then becomes worth lots of money, that would do me no good... but then if i keep it, nobody ever sees it... what a dilema but, you see the kind of bullshit that drives me nuts.... to sell or not to sell.... the museum of modern art is stuck in 1930 and i am on my own out here.... as van gogh was on his own in 1880... so well, i better get back to work here, or I will lose what job I do have and be fucked good and proper...will talk to you soon...

...I am an Image artist.  What that means is that I am working in the objective tradition in which the artist makes representations, images, that more or less resemble things in the visible world.  I believe that it is a very natural process for human beings to use these sorts of representations to make communications...

... When I am facing a blank surface to begin a piece of art in my studio, I face the same problems as the artist in the caves of Lascaux, the artist on Easter Island, the Hollywood director, Jan Vermeer, Yamamoto Biitsu, and millions of contemporary artists;  namely how can I best make a profound image communication...

... My own practice is intuitive.  I attempt to bring images composed from forms and patterns from the depths of my subconscious directly to the surface I am working on.  Part of my technique for doing this is to focus on process and let the meaning happen...

...  I believe that human beings are image generators and image readers and that we do not have to work at it to have the images we make have meaning.  It is virtually impossible for a human being to make a meaningless image and by looking at the images others make, we will find meaning.  We are completely and thoroughly image/symbol makers and readers.  This is the most interesting element of the notion of abstract art as an art of pure process without meaning... 

...There are three actual influences on my own work.  First, the technical tradition of European/American representational art.  Second, the images from that tradition and third, the images from the tradition of the women of the Ndebele tribe of South Africa .  I use the techniques and materials traditional to European/American art, oil paint, India ink, watercolor, canvas and paper.  The nude figure, a staple from the European classical tradition is my subject.  My styles derives from a mixture of my study of classical European, especially old master and Victorian, painting and the geometric art of the Ndebele people of South Africa who have a matriarchal tradition of geometric decoration of house walls and personal artifacts...

... I realized that I have a phobia about everything related to my art except the doing of it... I could tell you about my history, oh it goes on and on... i have spent my life avoiding selling art or showing it to people except via publication a thousand miles from home... 

... I am not a good sales person and am quiet and shy by nature. art openings and functions like that get me really upset and so, I have just stayed away from all that... I have spent a lifetime going out of my way to not show my art to people, except literary people a thousand miles or more from my home...

... I love painting and drawing... it seems to me that these are real human things to do... we have hands and fingers and drawing is somehow a magical thing, making some representation of reality moves the communication automatically in to the realm of the symbols and images that the human brain uses to understand and reconstruct the universe...

...nonobjective art and gallery installations are to me very different from the kind of art that moves me.. if the contemporary art I see were the only art available, if I did not know the history of art, I would simply say that I am not an artist, know or care nothing about art and what I do has nothing to do with art... so, you see, I have a victorian sensibility in many ways but my images really look modern in the sense that term was understood a hundred years ago... but pickled cows in a jar or a mannequin dressed this or that way, are of no interest to me..

... the art world really is stuck in the mid twentieth century in a time loop that cannot move forward or backward... the aesthetic demands unconventional nontraditional ways of doing art that will shock the gallery goer.. without violating the paradigm of the going to the art gallery.. it is incredible that this emperor's new cloths bullshit has been on top still for 50 years...

... I think it may be possible that an aesthetic revolution will be coming and in fact, my image art is far more acceptable now than it was even 15 or 20 years ago...when I left the u of mn in 1972, I was convinced that if those people were what the world of art was about, there was no place in that world for me...I was just doing something totally different than the abstract expressionism and gallery installations they were jazzed about. and the funny thing is that while the art people could not relate to my work then, everybody else who saw it dug it and so I started publishing my drawings and literary people seem to really dig my work even though the art people are still busy with their mannequins and their gallery installations...

...many men do art to impress women and to find girl friends and that is part of the problem why so much art is so mediocre... arts loft buildings all over the usa are full of twenty something folks who want to be artists because they have the notion that it is something hip to be and they may get laid... well, good for them but for me the art is what matters... in my personal life, i am a quiet person... i was raised in a working class environment and imbued with the protestant work ethic to the degree that I have spent my whole life working like an idiot at these difficult and demanding jobs... well, i am not a womanizer... i don't really have the time or energy for that... i do art for other reasons... plus, i have been married for 37 years... so, I am not looking for a girlfriend...