Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

These days newish art can be priced between $10 000 and $25 000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1 200 they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art but by no means all seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock a flower the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two it's bad art.

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue but I've done many.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem with each painting being a single stanza.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

My painting does not come from the easel.

I have no fear of making changes destroying the image etc. because the painting has a life of its own.

When I judge art I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes it is not art.

Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.

Painting n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company comforts and inspires.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

When I work alone my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac it's more like movie making.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation when God and the world were alone together without man!