You know, I'm incredibly blessed to be able to have this level of choice as an artist today. In this economy, it's something that I, you know, pinch myself at constantly, just thinking about how I could wake up tomorrow and decide I'm going to start painting this or that. So it's good.

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

I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.

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.

This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.