If I'm going through something, I paint through it. It's very physical. I'm writing, I'm thinking, I'm meditating, I'm moving, I'm jumping off ladders, and it's therapeutic.

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.

People have thought that some of my writing and lines are done by a machine. I'm able to move in a way that's part gestural dance performance, and it's fun for me, so I incorporate that into the painting.

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.

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.

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.

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.