Robert Rauschenberg

If you're going to paint extremely, you need a big piece of canvas.

Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.