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There were some extremely good teachers there that were great artists really in their own right. It was actually very hard to concentrate on getting down to going any work being an art student especially when it's a flighty thing at best.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

In the past, art was admired and revered from afar. Today, there is more of an interactive relationship between the art and the person who admires it.

Drawings, paintings, and sculptures. That's the three pillars of art academia.

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

The School of the Art Institute is an extraordinary teaching institution by the fact that it believes that active studio artists are good teachers. That may seem an obvious statement, but in higher education, it is often the student's course evaluations that win the day with administrators.

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.