I think a lot of male artists should and probably are thinking in the same ways. The culture has moved in a more democratic, pluralistic direction. You now find a lot of people who are looking outside of the mainstream of the history of art for their mentors. Maybe not heroes, but mentors.

In terms of my inspirations to become an artist, I think they come from early ideas and impressions about community, and the type of community I wanted to be in, and the type of thinking I wanted to do.

I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.

Co-mingling really disturbs a lot of the purists, who want to see the historical and cultural divides instead of the meshing.

In art school, they teach you to struggle through the process: If you have your image down, you've painted it, and it's not looking the way you wanted it to, you can do wet on wet - you just keep moving the image around.

There tends to be a sort of mundane quality to what I select - things from around the house, around the studio. I'm not ashamed of the craft shop - the art supply store - and I don't need my work to be anti-art store, but I also believe in using things that are just sort of around - it makes sense to me.

I feel no shame about having paintings be as grandiose and ridiculous as possible.