I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.

I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.

Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're all here talking about it today. It still lives. I don't believe in ghosts, but these are contemporary ghosts.

What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.