I think good art has good concept behind it. Nothing can always articulate fully the way a Ph.D. candidate can articulate their thesis, because artists work with a combination of intuition and intellect blended together and out comes whatever they produce. So it's a blend of kind of a sensual response to material and an intellectual response to idea, maybe a blend of the two.

I want to create objects that will stimulate the viewer in ways that I am stimulated by these objects. Now that's an ideal situation and the artist has no control over what his audience is going to think, but they can try to communicate some quality, some poetry through the work and just hope that the viewer has something in the vicinity of a similar experience.

A person who is driven to spend their time and energy doing something must believe in it, whether they want recognition for it, money from it, or if it's a cathartic experience to do it, whatever their motivation that is valid for them. That's the artist's motivator.

I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.

A lot of the pieces I've done over the years have involved alterations of scale and the idea of the viewer's relationship to the object and how we see things by either enlarging or reducing objects, it causes the viewer to look at them again. It's hard to do because our culture is so bombarded by images and media. How do you make something fresh for a viewer? That's a real challenge.

One nice thing about L.A. is that you can work here in privacy, but that also works against you because you can get forgotten here, too. I think in New York, it's hard to be left alone. It's hard to have privacy whereas here, you can have it.

I don't need to control the mind of my viewer. Now this might sound contradictory because I want to make these installations set up an environment that will produce a certain kind of experience in the viewer, but beyond a certain point, I take hands off and leave it up to chance and personal experience. So maybe it's a marriage of control and no control we're talking about where the artist produces the artifact or the environment and then walks away from it, and the second half of the equation is the viewer and their personal history and how they feel about what they're experiencing.