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.

I’m not sure a lot of other people would walk up to the same artwork and see the shadow on the person’s face from the hat and be like “Do you see that!” It’s about noticing things that interest you, and that definitely happens with the natural world as well.

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.

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.

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