My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly.

I think of my work as very polarizing; either people really do like it and are touched by it or they really don't get it at all. It's not accessible to all people at the same level.

My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves.

My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly.

The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me.

I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests.

The most important thing is to try and enjoy life because you never know when it will be gone. If you wake up in the morning and have a choice between doing the laundry and taking a walk in the park, go for the walk. You'd hate to die and realize you had spent your last day doing the laundry.