It's hard to fathom the psychology of the economics of art. I don't quite understand it, and I don't necessarily want to understand it.

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 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.

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.

I have been very influenced by the Japanese concept of space - the preciousness of space, and how one's environment can be shaped to make the most out of limited resources. That's the kind of thing we need to look at again - how momentous the results can be from very subtle changes.

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 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.