The way I understand composition and form and my ability to enter into material all comes from my disciplines and my commitment as a painter - my energy, my arm, my eyes, my sense of space and form and time. It's a wonderful realm for me. I never leave it.

How do we get utopian thinking in a dystopian world? These days we aren't talking to each other - we're screaming and trying to hit each other over the head with rocks and sticks. A primitive fury has been unleashed by a president who has no culture, who cannot read, and who wants to determine power and aggression.

The people from where I grew up have no appreciation for Paleolithic rocks or menstrual calendars. I'm a retriever of lost iconographies. But I had real training and have deep discipline, and I believe in it. Too much of the work I see today is just cultural junk. It's very superficial and has no rigor. It doesn't address the dynamic and real politics of an aesthetic structure.

I'm used to working with neglect and misunderstanding, so this has been really challenging. It's a different psychic realm. The Lion did not land easily here.

An older friend once told me, "Life didn't ask for your opinion," which I liked.

I don't even like the word 'relax'! If I have a partner and we make love a lot, then I'm in a very pure state of being.

In the end, it's always a single person who makes change. But I do think we should try to send artists out into the world and not have them all stick together in the big cities.