I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn't going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they're very narrow.