"Notes collected by Henri's students over the course of his years as a teacher. Still some of the best advice available to art students. Henri is never condescending, always speaks to students as peers."

"If I were to choose a teacher, it would be George Steiner. As well as reading his books, I watch his interviews on YouTube and his references always lead you somewhere interesting — whether it’s a piece of music, a debate about the human need for tragedy, a passage from Shakespeare or Montaigne. He’s into High Art and couldn’t be described as a trendy theorist. But in this book he pushes you to think about what gives art its fundamental qualities. “Real Presences” is an expanded essay that ask the question: Is making art a wager on the existence of God?"

"I was about 16. We had this great art room in school and an absolutely brilliant teacher, Bob White. This art room was really well equipped with dark rooms and screen printing and painting. Bob was quite happy for us to play records. If you were in there, you could hear what other people were putting on. Somebody older than me was hip and put on Velvet Underground & Nico. That was just so influential. I often think that the ones that have lasted really well for me are songs like 'Sunday Morning', some of the kind of quieter, more reflective ones."

"Carolyn Cassady was the wife of Neal Cassady who is the hero in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” She was his wife, but also an artist and art teacher, and she was linked to this absolute lunatic of a man who was her Achilles heel. He regularly betrayed her, but you love who you love. She had a love affair with Kerouac as well—weirdly because Neal Cassady suggested it. She was an incredibly gifted writer, but she was managing these crazy men in her life and bringing up her children and I guess she didn’t see herself in that way. But she wrote with so much intuition and insight, and a lot of beauty as well."

"My second film is an Israeli film called “The Kindergarten Teacher.” It’s a story about a kindergarten teacher, a woman who discovers that one of her young students, this cherubic little 5-year-old boy, is a poetic prodigy. The movie is, on one level, a kind of a psychological thriller, and a very disturbing one, about her growing obsession with this boy. And her sense that it’s her mission to save him from a society that isn’t gonna care about him. It also works, though, as a critique of that society; Israel, in the director’s view, has abandoned its cultural heritage, its commitment to art, and has become a materialistic and shallow society. The filmmaking was so simple and clear, and it was a very suspenseful movie. I was sort of frustrated because it had a very small release in the United States. It didn’t have Juliette Binoche in it [laughs], so it was not even on the radar, necessarily, of people who go and see movies with subtitles. And yet, it’s very entertaining. But also with this theme: “Why is poetry important? What are the values of a society that kind of push it to the side or don’t take it seriously? And how do you counteract that?” It’s just a very rich movie that I wish more people had seen."