Sometimes your personal life is much more significant. Sometimes your work life is more significant. Friends and family, or sometimes the general population, take precedence.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life.

It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically.

As an artist, you want to have an experience. What you need to experience changes over the course of your life because your life changes.

You start with a generic body, but I think the first wall you hit with portraiture is comprised of history and storytelling and the nature of characters - whether they are historical or coming from literature or documentation. Those are the references we have to people, besides your family, and the intimacy of portraiture is in the specifics of individuals. For me, it came out of doing things about animals.

I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day.