When you present works of art, one thing I've learned is that if you're lucky - [Laughs] - there will be those few people who, shall we say, get it? Really become engaged, become moved by it in their own way. You cannot control what other people are going to think about it.

The idea of words and photos was something that appealed to me.

Art was something that I was really interested in, probably more so than writing or anything else.

I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know.

I really kind of liked the fluidity and not really being tied down. I saw the kind of people that were tenured and what happened to them there and I thought it was kind of death, really.

I was never that big a rock-and-roll, rock guy. I really preferred jazz, you know, that kind of thing.

After I did the drawings of trees combining them with words, I started doing - I did that for a very short time. Then it kind of - that sort of evolved into just showing the branches of a tree coming down into the trunk and then going into the root system. So I showed both the branches and the roots of a tree, which were about equal. There is as much going on under the ground as is going on above the ground, which you can see.