Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

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.

The miracle of being able to pay attention to other people in your life, and the miracle of being in time, and to continue being in time.

I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.

I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.

The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding.

I didn't start to be an artist myself until I was 24.