Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

I need to say to you. There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don’t tell them or write them down, if you don’t make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard.

The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.

We tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see.

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing.