All I want to do is realism and follow the tradition of realism. And explore what realism should be now be after the ubiquity of smartphones. I'm trying to answer the question. I don't think I'll ever have the words, but hopefully I'll have a few images.

We're making so many images today and it's unbelievable. I shoot stuff all the time. I try to figure a lot out before I paint. I do a tremendous amount of shooting.

I've always wished that I had a great ability to verbalize art theory and find a way that I fit in to the whole lineage, but I don't have a clue.

Fondness for people can be terrifying, because it's intangible and it can disappear, or it can be taken away, or you can say the wrong thing. A million things, so it's so uncomfortable. So when you suddenly become aware of it because they don't call you or something for half an hour or whatever, you lose it.

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.

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.

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.