I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.
I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.
Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.
Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.
If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out...