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 had stopped making figures, and then I began making images of animals in nature, which was a way to introduce the figure.

I'm in general a nostalgic person, but I don't know if I'm nostalgic for the 80s!

I always thought it was a trap to fit into ideologies, and maybe that's a luxury position, but my work is a reflection of my being here. My being here is not a reflection of an idea.

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.

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

My iPhone has changed my life - I spend hours taking photos of the sidewalk as I walk down the street. I like the casualness, that it's low-resolution.