It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

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

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

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people real street scenes behind the curtain scenes live models paintings photographs staged setups architecture grids graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation when God and the world were alone together without man!