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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think that I'm going to be including a lot of anonymous female artists in what I look at and incorporate. Most textiles are created by women. Generally, most stuff that's not in the canon is created by women.

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.