Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.

I see my work as having a relationship to the visual world, not just some emotive residue of my feelings. It relates to something that exists, or might exist, rather than a transcendent mental state or something like that.

I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.

I had studied history at Brown and didn't feel like doing anything with it. What does one do with a history degree besides become a historian? And the professors in school, it seemed like they were just writing books for other professors to comment on, and vice versa - it was the most self-referential, boring world you could ever imagine.

All I can say is that when I paint, I am looking at things that are in the world.

Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.

When I eat, I always pick out the best parts in the middle and leave everything else on the side. It becomes a big sculptural mess, but there are nice compositional elements about how it all sits on the table.