The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.
I don't do anecdotes. I accumulate experiences.
Certainly I have made comments on American society with the various pictures and have done about nine antiwar paintings. But I did them because I was incorporating my feelings into my work.
I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn.
I'm interested in contemporary vision - the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing! Bang!
Warhol was questioning the capitalist society.
When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.
I am getting old, so I really don't like clocks.
Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.
I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.
When I got my first loft, I still didn't know what I was going to paint... There were long stretches when I just sat there and thought without interruption.
It's amazing how you meet people through other people. I knew a racecar driver, Stefan Johansson, who was very hot. He introduced me to Jean Todt. He introduced me to a French doctor. He introduced me to a French architect who redid the Louvre with I.M. Pei. He introduced me to Daniel Boulud.
I used to know Madison Avenue advertisers. I didn't like 'em. Bunch of jerks.
I started billboard painting in Minneapolis, and I went to General Outdoor Advertising, and I said, 'I could do that.' They said, 'Oh yeah... we can always use a good man around here.'
I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.
I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.
I'm the one who gave steroids to Pop art.
The best thing about being an artist is the free clothing and getting to kiss pretty girls.
I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land': things that were a little out of style but hadn't reached the point of nostalgia.
There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!
