We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.

We all know artists who like to collaborate, who like to work as a team. It all kind of depends what your habitual working method is.

The trick is not to look back, but keep on expressing where I'm at now. It's challenging to create something new, so it's crucial to dwell in the present moment.

Street posters allowed you to have the last word. If you put them up in your neighborhood, you were speaking to your neighbor.

Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive.

By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.