I always thought that art that is produced somehow has to reflect the zeitgeist or the ambiance and the time and the history in which it is produced. I think it's inescapable. It's like we look back now, at work done savoring the thirties, and you can almost tell it was done during that period of time. Now maybe, that's a style of period or something, I don't know. I think my work, or the things that interest me, come out of my reaction to history.

L.A. as a geographical entity is very much a mixture of surf, desert, and the mountains, earthquakes and urban sprawl. Within an hour of driving, you can be out into the desert. I like that very much about living on the edge of a continent, conceptually is an interesting place to be. You're at this kind of juncture of a tectonic plate. The idea that the Pacific Ocean is right behind us, on a macro scale, is an interesting place to be.

I think we all have a tendency to have things. Even, I've noticed, people on the street collect things. So I think there's some kind of human impulse to collect. That's why they build museums, I guess.

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.

That's what I like about the idea of the aesthetic experience, the idea of both enjoying looking at works of art and how they kind of talk to you, and also the process of making art, getting back to that idea of the aesthetic experience of making art is very important, It's another way of thinking. Instead of just using your brain, you're using your hands to think with. They're different connections, the brain that comes through the fingertips as opposed that comes through the eyes and ears.

I don't keep up with the art world. It's out there and if I did that too much, I wouldn't get my own work done. So I look at it every so often, "Oh, yeah, oh, okay," and go back to work. Life isn't that long. You got to do what you can when you have it.

I can't make things I don't feel passionately about. I've never been able to. Years ago when I was going through college, I was trying to earn some extra money by making motel paintings and it was the hardest work I've ever done in my life, psychically. It was just torture.