For me, the canvas is an abstract interpretation of a wall. It's a piece of art with its own history, one that alludes to the passage of time and to the theater of life.

My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.

Sometimes I think I shouldn't explain much about my work because people will just feel what they feel when they see it. They'll love it or hate it or enjoy it on their own, like how I've looked at abstract paintings of other artists and cried or felt happy because I've felt, "Wow, I've lived that, I've understood that."

Sometimes I'm inspired by a certain part of my life - I'm thinking about a place and I'll mix the colors from memory.

As a young kid I was in love with breakdancing. I practiced the uprock style, which is a battle style of dance that looks like fighting. It comes from the gangs in New York in the 1960s and '70s. It's beautiful, almost like a martial art, and it can be funny, too, because you make fun of each other.

I never want to abandon my roots. I want to give my past and the history of painting the importance it deserves, including the masters like Rembrandt, who built up the surface of the canvas with transparent layers.

My style also has a lot to do with theater because often I'm imagining I'm a character who is wandering by a wall and leaves a mark. Then I'm someone else, who 10 days later leaves another mark. Someone was angry and did this, and then someone came and painted over it, and then the sun bleached it out and the weather exposed it again.