It's been so much a part of my life the thinking that I go through is crucial. I found that if I don't paint for around a week, I get practically suicidal. It took a long time to figure out why I had these mood swings, and I finally figured out it's because I haven't painted.

I read that prior to the advent of color TV, most people dreamed in black and white.

I started getting afraid of dying. I don't have any religion and I wanted to understand something about these greater powers without anthropomorphizing it.

I don't try to force-feed it or put any things on the images until I'm making a painting. It's not photorealism. Photorealism's goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can't beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer. I don't want to go blind doing what a printer can do.

We discard the personal specifics which don't conform to the ideal conventional beauty created by art directors and cinematographers.

There's the people who have one of these cell phones in their pockets and don't have a clue how it's made. But I really want to understand.

Now that I'm a father of three kids, suddenly the whole world seems different. I don't want to take anything for granted. If you gaze on something and you appreciate it, you become a part of that circle. That seemed to me to be the only relevance I could understand. The space, the time and the vastness of it all was overwhelming. I needed to understand it or I just was lost.