It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.

The forties seventies and the nineties when money was scarce were great periods when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten and the more a picture has to give the greater it is.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.