Every single painting is different. I'm always trying to figure out what I'm interested in. Usually when I go through and I make the collages or the images for ideas that I want to paint, it's like an Ouija board. Each painting I do is trying to understand what the hell I'm looking at, or want to look at.

I wanted to finally feel better about understanding. I painted my wife because I wanted to understand her. I can talk to her, but I didn't understand why I was so compelled.

Star Wars came out when I was seven. It was so different from anything else, like peeking into the land of Oz. All you wanted to do was see it again and go back and see more of it. That feeling is not easy to reproduce. Eventually, you give up and try to recreate that feeling yourself.

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.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

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.

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