The walls around us bear witness to lives past and present.

When I was young I was constantly reading walls; I took in everything written on walls, from love messages to political messages. It was my hobby and became my art.

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.

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.

You try to tap into a memory and you close your eyes and it comes back. So I was doing this in the painting and then that became a practice of mine. Sometimes it was a cathartic situation, a way to meditate.

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.

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."