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.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.

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.

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

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 paint with shapes.

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

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten and the more a picture has to give the greater it is.

My painting does not come from the easel.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Every good painter paints what he is.

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.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.