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.

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'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. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

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.

Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.

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