Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

I think people who make objects like the distance; they're not there when the other person is taking it in.

Art should create an experience.

Connecting to another is one of the most important things in the world and you can keep expanding that connection - one person, a family, a community, a country, a society, a culture.

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.