It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond.
I'm no Jerry Seinfeld. I wasn't raised with some backyard with a creek and trees and all that.
I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to thosedays when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers... only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.
My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.
summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat;it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.
The Forest of Arden, where I grew up, is where 'As You Like It' is set. It was idyllic.
I grew up in a small town in Georgia where nothing bad happened - it was like Mayberry.
I grew up just outside Hay-on-Wye, on the borders of Wales, on a farm. It was an amazing childhood, but I got a bit stir crazy when I hit my teens. There was the feeling of having to get out, you know, but it was definitely idyllic.
My dad was fairly well-off, so I was raised in a very comfortable environment: the very nice suburbs of Paris. It was a very idyllic life. I also spent nearly all my summers in Britain, and Christmas, too, because my grandparents lived there.
My childhood is completely... when I look back, it was '50s in New York, upper-middle class, it was completely idyllic and golden and wonderful - sweet in every way.
