A lot of the acting students would do modeling in the arts school, so there were some gorgeous girls, but the cliché in our school was to get either the really emaciated person or the really obese person - which is stupid.

I think a lot of people take a scholarly approach where they feel like you're supposed to study things that depress you.

I suppose the good artists, the righteous artists, somehow manage to be exuberant, and the embarrassed artist has this idea that everybody has to stop being so excited, which I find so distasteful.

You have to like everything that you're painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh... but I like everything in all my paintings. It's as if you need to be less intelligent at that level.

That was an important development for me, just realizing that you need to follow your pleasure, at least as a painter. I think any kind of artist needs to, no matter what you're doing.

There is, literally and figuratively, not a gold standard. That's almost as big a problem in art as in the financial world. How do you affix a value to something that only has value because a certain number of people agree to believe in that value?

When I went to college, and I went to art school, I started to realize that Warhol was cool and that pop art was fun.