It’s interesting with art. Some people have the ability—and the energy—not just to make the work, but to make sure it’s put in exactly the right place, at the right moment. Some artists realize they have to spend as much time as it took them to get an idea in finding the way to show it, and the infrastructure to support it. And some artists just

I liked Hegedušić very much. He said two things that I’ve always remembered. First, that if you get so good at drawing with your right hand that you can even make a beautiful sketch with your eyes closed, you should immediately change to your left hand to avoid repeating yourself. And second, don’t flatter yourself that you have any ideas. If

In 1965, though, when I was nineteen, I did a kind of breakthrough painting: it was a small picture called Three Secrets. This very simple canvas shows three pieces of fabric—one red, one green, one white—draped over three objects. The picture felt important to me because instead of presenting an easily digestible image, it made the viewer a

It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: “My paintings are but the ashes of my art.”

Deep shame, maximum self-consciousness. When I was young it was impossible for me to talk to people. Now I can stand in front of three thousand people without any notes, any preconception of what I’m going to say, even without visual material, and I can look at everyone in the audience and talk for two hours easily. What happened? Art happened.

Once, though, my school had an exchange program with kids from Croatia. And I went to the home of this Croatian girl in Zagreb, and she had the most wonderful family. Her parents were loving with each other and with their children; at meals they all sat at the table, talked together, and laughed a lot. Then the girl came to stay with my family, and

The only good present my mother ever got me was a book called Letters: Summer 1926, about the three-way correspondence between Rilke, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago. The three had never met, but they adored each other’s work, and for four years they all wrote sonnets and sent them to one

Reading Rilke, on the other hand, was like breathing in pure poetic oxygen. He spoke of life in a different way than I’d ever understood it before. His expressions of cosmic suffering and universal knowledge related to ideas I would find later in Zen Buddhist and Sufi writings. Coming upon them for the first time was intoxicating: Earth, isn’t this

while the rest of the flat was stuffed with stuff, paintings and books and furniture, from a very early age I kept both my rooms spartak—Spartan. As empty as possible. In my bedroom, just the bed, one chair, and a table. In my studio, just the easel and my paints.