Sometimes I'll dream that I saw a show and then I'll wake up in the morning and realize that I didn't see the show, that it was my dream. And I just remember what the paintings look like in the dream and I think, "Oh, nobody painted those. I can do that."

I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.

Some people might think that the paintings are involved with a mythic - not just subject matter - but a certain sort of physical space that the paintings occupy...like personages.

There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.

We need to not be scared [of muslim], but understand each other. When you're around these people, you see they have much more in common than their differences.