I was never exposed to art school. I grew up in an artist's studio. I was exposed a lot of studio time between of my father and a great painter I studied with in Barcelona. That was my art school, as Europe was.

I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.

I had a visit from an artist friend who basically said, "Your paintings are wonderful. Now stop." It did resonate with me. It hit on the percolating need for change that was already there. I got a little push. I did a group of the paintings early on that were among the best. It was sort of beginner's luck with these.

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.

People see so many things in the paintings. Although I never think of them, it charms me a little bit that people actually project actual scenarios on to the paintings. Hopefully that means that they have a little bit of life to them. Figuring out the rhythm, the structural element has been the key thing in this work, more than the color element. It really was the variety of different widths that lead to a certain movement, a rhythm. Otherwise I'd fall into anything that was too stripy or almost like bar codes, and it thwarted the natural flow of the painting.

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

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