“I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. Its the most radical thing.”

Some people are enraged, and some people are applauding. If there were a mission statement for graffiti, that would be it.

That’s immediately how I gauge how healthy a city is-by the amount of tags. It’s just in direct competition with advertising. It’s still one of the last things that hasn’t been corrupted.

I’m really into California art from the ’60s.

Most inspiration still comes from bicycling around San Francisco. This city never fails to inspire me. It is one of the most vibrant cities – especially visually – with a constant influx of young energy arriving daily. I love it.

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still – it’s not something that a museum would really embrace.

I was called Rembrandt Hope in my boxing days, because I spent so much time on the canvas.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.

I’m doing the shows. The stage is my canvas; I’ll put whatever up there for the visible eye.

So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac.

What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

A painter’s got a canvas. The writer’s got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.