This morning I got up early and I was glazing the paintings and they just looked so beautiful. I had a private moment of "yeah, I'm behind this." Which is all that matters as an artist, to believe in what you're doing. It sounds like an obvious thing but it takes a lot of work.

I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.

It's not until the very last phase that you know how good the works are going to be.

I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.

Painting is something that requires a lot of time - it's not just one good idea out of art school.

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.

If you come every day or every month to my studio, you won't see that much change, but if you come once a year, you'll see big new categories opened up.