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The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

I think there are a lot of pictures to make. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter. To me, the making of the pictures is the most important thing.

I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.

To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations.