I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.

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'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.

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

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

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

One of the most important elements of Caio-ness I wanted to keep was that left to right reading, where one form draws you... this movement in what is otherwise a fairly still art, that sense of pulling the eye. It involves a sense of time. To me that's esoteric and magical and playful, and if a painting doesn't have that, to me it's just canvas and paint. If it does have that, then it rises above its materials.