The artistic process in digital art is very much the same as for making other kinds of paintings.

As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.

There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.

The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.

I always had wished somebody else would sing my songs, but there wasn't anybody who knew them, so I sang them myself and eventually became a better singer and guitar player.

Take a bunch of little kids to the beach and they all make art. Adults are too stupid to call it art, but it is art. They'll use their imaginations, make drama, make up characters, make pictures in the sand, they'll make up songs that no one's ever heard before. All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.