"When I painted my seated men, I saw them as gyroscopes. Portraiture always fascinated me because I love the particula…"

"Bill [Willem de Kooning] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.…"

"Always when I look at anyone's art, I get flashes of the person. If I walk into a room and there's a painting by Joan…"

"[In the past] women painted women: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, and so forth. And I thought, men alw…"

"I always say I'm an escape artist, Style is something I've always tried to avoid. I'm more interested in character. C…"

"Nowadays, when an artist discovers 'the sky,' it's like a bride who has never done any housework raving about her fir…"

"One of the reasons I was asked to do the portrait [of president J. F. Kennedy, winter of 1962–63, destined for the Tr…"

"I began [to portray president Kennedy ] with fragmentary sketches—first in charcoal, then in casein, sometimes just h…"

"Beside my own intense, multiple impressions of him, I also had to contend with his 'world image' created by the endle…"

"A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image."