People quickly look through things and don't sit and experience. That's a problem with artwork, [because] it's more of an experience than something to quickly look at. It takes a while for everything to unveil itself.

Sometimes I forget what I put in. I want to capture things in that way, where you're looking into your memory, a dream or hallucination. The characters become a mixture of archetypes, [and] that's what I like. You're trying to figure it out and your brain wants to categorize things, but it can't because of this motion. You want to solve the problem, but it never gets solved. It's like when you read a really good book and the story never leaves you.

My work makes people understand things in a visual way that I could never understand in a literal way - like the way you deal with and break down problems, and don't come up with answers, but [find] a pathway that becomes clearer.

Say someone tells me their name - that name can turn into a taste or a color and that's how I categorize it in my mind. It's an easy way of categorizing things.

As I work day after day, inspirations from different places go into the work. It's combination, but it's also comparative. I'll be reading two books at the same time that are totally different [and] then have two stories mix together.

I never think about actual things when I'm painting. I'm not thinking, "I'm going to put a person here, a tree here and a bird there." The beginning stage is always the sound. From that, slowly, stories come about based on what I'm reading or thinking at the time, but if I didn't have that sound I don't know what I would do.

When I was taking art history I was always angry that we would skip certain chapters because "it wasn't important." Like, "Let's skip over the Japanese. Let's just get to Giotto, because that's where everything begins." It's like, no. Everything is relevant to me.