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

I feel like there’s a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens. When I go to that space, I’m completely in this world of possibility.

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.

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.

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.