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

What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us.

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.

As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

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.'

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.