“The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.”

“Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.”

“King of the Ruskin was my show last year, last May, in New College Long Room. I filled that old room with seven big paintings. Big, colourful paintings. King of the Ruskin included better work than Abstractionism. I’ve tried since to paint like that and I can’t. The King of the Ruskin paintings were it. I didn’t realise it at the time but they were the best paintings I would ever make. They were the paintings I wanted to see and they did everything I wanted painting to do at that time. So these are my last paintings. I will never paint again. But why didn’t I stop in the first place? No one ever knows when to stop. They just decline. For me, I had to kill my painting. With King of the Ruskin I had delivered the mortal wounds but one rarely has the pleasure of a quick and graceful exit. No, it has been slow, painful and distressing. Of course I am speaking in hindsight; I only realised it was the end with the randomly themed, scrappy, clustered paintings where it finally became apparent to me that I had no skills, no ideas, no interest, no pride and no pleasure in painting. I was like a dying cowboy, making a final, feeble bid at victory with random, aimless shots at an invisible enemy.”

“I don't think painters have the answers about a painting except the painting itself. Anyway, a painting has to have some kind of mystery to it to make it work.”

“The hall door, beside which Rob worked that dreary noon, looked very old; its weathered brown paint was carved by long black lines left by leaks in the porch.”

“I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange." ~ White Oleander”