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

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.

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

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.

Everyone accepts the abstraction of Bach. My work aspires to the same kind of abstraction, which is so engaging that you're distracted from asking about what it means. So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category. Once it's in the viewer's eyes my job will be judged on whether or not it is engaging and pulls you in to a kind of intelligence or poetic something going on there that makes it sustainable to look at.

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

All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.