So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category.

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.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic. If you stop asking what they mean, or what they remind you of, and just look at them for 29 seconds, you find that they want to explain themselves and show you how much every tiniest detail is related to the whole.

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.

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

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 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.