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

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!

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'm peripheral in Colab's history because others were involved in media, filmmaking, and music, and I was always a studio artist.

In our family, there wasn't anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother's singing.

One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your new self into life. Like your skin starts hanging off your arms and stuff, and then you have to think, well that's really beautiful too. It just isn't beautiful in a way that I knew it was beautiful before.