What excites me and what I find most compelling is clearly not what excites other artists. It comes from my own idiosyncratic background and what I'm drawn to. Maybe this is a result of having lived in Naples during a formative period of time. I'm interested in telling a unique story in a very intense way.

I have a fairly unwieldy set of concerns that go into determining what I do in the paintings, such as the history of the decorative, patterns of cultural migration, Islamic art and design, Byzantine architecture, the annals of natural history, as well as contemporary painting. All of these things are filtered through my own sense of cultural urgency. How I proceed with the work has to do with how I respond to this instinctively chosen mass of materials. I'm weighing many things and making many decisions before I even get started on a painting.

For me, the whole idea of the radically new is tied to a close reconsideration of older sources. I like to give myself over to those sources, as points of origin, in order to bring things forward. My approach requires me to internalize my sources as much as possible in the hope that new themes might emerge. The material has to be internalized in order for it to live again. Ultimately, paintings reveal themselves on the basis of what they are. They are inseparable from the physical process that goes into their making.

I think that is the role of the artist in society - the cultural role of the artist is to perform a healing function.

I'm very tolerant of other art and other artists. But what I truly appreciate, what I truly admire in contemporary art, is work that takes on more than it can sometimes handle - art that gets in over its head.

An artist makes something to be physically experienced by another person. It's a raw, freely chosen, interpersonal relationship between the maker and the viewer, so it's close to what a musical composer does, or a poet or a dancer. It is coming out of one's inner being.

I will do a lot of research and create a lot of material for use in one painting. And then I go on discovering and working with a whole other range of material in another painting. I'm interested in a fairly comprehensive and orchestrated synthesis that might bring about a new situation consisting of this hidden material. I'm interested in hidden source material.