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.

A large part of California is a sensual state. It has a huge range of geographical features and in addition to the deserts and the mountains and the huge coast line. The fact that we don't have harsh seasons, like they have in the East, means you can have convertible cars. There's more sunshine, per year here, and it affects people psychologically and physically. I think California has always been an attractive place for many, a lot of strange cults have been here over the years. Again, it's an experimental place.

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.

The idea of getting old and dying, falling apart, does not sound fun at all to me, but it's an observation that I'm sure I'm not the first one to express. There're thousands of year of history attest to the same thing. Maybe it's the way I'm personally dealing with that inevitable transition. So I'm making metaphors out of the work possibly to think about that and try to get comfortable with the idea.

I happen to like regionalism, whatever that means. I like the idea of art that somehow specifically reflects some aspect of a community or culture from which was created, the idea of uniform art sounds dreadfully boring and almost fascistic in its implication. So in that sense, I really celebrate the idea of a place that allows for a range of ideas and certainly L.A. does that.

I think at one point, a whole new younger generation of critics come in and they're really aware of zeitgeist in their group, and the older artists tend to get forgotten as their critics retire and do other things or stop paying attention. So there's a factor of aging that I think is to be considered, too. As a middle-aged artist, you kind of get put on a shelf for the young ones.

As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor and realizing that being an artist is like being an inventor because you create problems for yourself and you solve them and you create things that weren't there before. That's awfully simplified, but that's how it is.