I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.

Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

The representational-image urge is actually a kind of heightened perception, and I don't stop to think. I don't freeze up - it's actually a kind of letting-go. It's like dancing. At a certain point it's conscious, unconscious, everything is kind of coming together.

I've always been amazed at the vastness of America itself and what it does and how it does it. I'm interested in the mechanics of what makes this country happen, the power structures, the natural splendor.

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.