You have to bring books to explain your work.

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

There was no image of the other biological half of myself. And as an artists, as a - as an - as a portraitist, the look of who you are was radically important to me.

It's a culture. It's - I mean, people obsess over this. And people create subcultures that identify - and there are people in the streets who will recognize certain patterns and signifiers.

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility.

If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different.

I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.