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.

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.

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.

In high school I was good at math and everybody wanted me to do something with that - mathematics or engineering - which was a nightmare scenario for me. Meeting other artists and going to punk rock shows at that age, there was a feeling of freedom and community that I wanted to partake in.

The humor for me is how far above your head the signature is - it's dislocated from the sign of the artist in such a distinct way that it could almost be a self-portrait of a sort.

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.

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.