There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good.

It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.

I said to myself, "If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one."

My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.

Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.

I love Thelonious Monk's song "Just a Gigolo." It's probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I'm mesmerized, because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.

Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them; but I don't think that's crucial.