I’ve never painted a painting without listening to jazz.
Becoming an artist was never a deliberate decision. It just crept up on me slowly and is still skulking around the corners of my life.
I narrowed down the options by choosing the path I felt right. I can’t recall the paths that I didn’t choose.
To me traditional art materials are burdensome: they point to themselves, or other points in history. I like to use a material that tells a different story and has a different history, often outside of art.
Social media turns works of art into objects of rapid consumption, sometimes supersonic, which I think makes us dangerously insensitive to the enormous amount of work, time, and sacrifice that lies behind each post, each evanescent image.
I like to make art that I do not understand. It shows, unrelentingly, that other worlds are possible.
In art, I find joy but no peace.
Why does all official portraiture always have to be celebratory—if you consider it as a visual catalog of past officials? Why can’t it also be a critical depiction or interpretation?
Can art change the world? Can it start a revolution, or stop one? If it can’t change the world, can it change an individual?
A lot of my work arises out of an accident, or stumbling on some event that spurs me to want to record it.