Art exists through the act of making. It has to somehow be made manifest to another person. It has to do with what one wants to see manifest, what one wants to bring into the world, what one desires to have exist.

I'm not so interested in the effort that it takes to have a self-promotional outlook. I believe in being quiet and making my work and just trying to make discoveries and let the painting evolve.

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.

Art exists through the act of making. It has to somehow be made manifest to another person. It has to do with what one wants to see manifest, what one wants to bring into the world, what one desires to have exist.

I'm trying to make a primitive painting. I'm trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic - a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I'm mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It's not about commodification, it's not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It's opposed to that direction.

I'm not so interested in this series of ruptures, where minimalism took over pop art, and then neo-expressionism was a triumph over that. I'm not interested in rupture - I'm interested in healing, bringing things together, building bridges. Not dismissing what has come before as a kind of modernist precedent, where one thing has to be broken in order to achieve something else. I don't believe in that kind of attitude. I think we're beyond that at this stage.

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.