ROBERT INDIANA

I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.

Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.

I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

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

I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.

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

I'm a little disappointed in what's happened. I'm beginning to lose faith in Obama. This Syria thing is ridiculous. He should not be drawing red lines.

The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.

There are people who don't like popularity. It's much better to be exclusive and remote.

I'm sure all the people who have been born 20 years ago don't know anything about me at all except 'LOVE', and that's a nasty word.

My art is a disciplined high dive - high soar, simultaneous & polychromous, an exaltation of the verbal-visual... my dialogue.

The American Dream - that's our folly. That's our folly. Look where we're ending up.

I paint the American scene.

When I was a kid, my mother used to drive my father to work in Indianapolis, and I would see, practically every day of my young life, a huge Phillips 66 sign. So it is the red and green of that sign against the blue Hoosier sky. The blue in the 'Love' is cerulean. Therefore, my 'Love' is an homage to my father.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

When I was painting portraits and - shall we say? - rather allegorical heads, which is the figurative work which immediately preceded the direction I have since gone, these images were always of a very fixed, rigid quality, and, of course, my work still has this aspect.

I really have to think of myself as a painter first because sculpture came much, much later. As a student at the Art Institute in Chicago, I simply never became involved in sculpture. I did prints, and I did paintings.

'LOVE' bit me. It was a marvelous idea, but it was also a terrible mistake. It became too popular; it became too popular.

It would be my intention that everybody should have love, and there are a lot of people in the world.

Love is a dangerous commodity - fraught with peril.

The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than - shall we say? - fifty percent of the total, and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.

'Hug' is my mother's word for affection.

I didn't think much about Marsden Hartley until very recently, but Gertrude Stein found him to be the best American painter in Europe at the time she was alive. I consider my tributes to him my most important works.

There are only two people in 'Eat' - myself and my favorite cat, Pachiki - and for 40 minutes, I eat one mushroom.