Are the female figures ever you?

Not really, unless I set out specifically to do a self-portrait, which is almost never. As I’ve aged, my women have aged. In that sense I’m following my physical shift through time. Hair has gotten grayer, things are drooping more, waistlines are expanding.

Tell me about your training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I felt like I was a holding pattern until I got out of school, in terms of following my personal thread. But then in my last semester, one day I walked into the lunchroom and several people I knew but didn’t like were all sitting together at the same table. It was an overwhelming experience to see them there. I couldn’t control myself. I went up to painting class and I did a painting that really went beyond painting the model. It was a group of people that had sharp tongues and looked weird; it was not what you were supposed to paint in art school. That was the start of figuring out that I could paint what I wanted to paint, rather than what I was told to paint.

Is there ever cruelty in your work now?

No. That was just that one instance. I love all the people in my paintings. I would take care of them, no matter what they look like or what they are doing. They might be misguided, they might be a little naughty, but they’re nice. Because I’m nice.

Even the earliest paintings in this exhibition depict interactions between men and women. Was that a preoccupation of yours in the mid-60s?

No. I was happily married, and everybody in my paintings had to have a significant other. In the early work, there would be a lot of times when I would be counting how many men and how many women were in the pictures, so that everybody would have a mate.