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

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

For me, at some point, the idea of struggling through the process was not as interesting as doing tests and executing the painting after I figured out all of its elements and how they were going to work together.

Most people who think they can't live up to the great painters of the past, often times have a group of people they think they're better than.

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.

Sometimes a collage element I hit upon can inspire the entire drawing.

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.