Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time.

I don't really use still photography very much anymore except to document my work.

I was good at art - always good at art.

I really wasn't about to get a Ph.D. in art history, you know, which you'd absolutely needed. And that was not something I wanted. And I loved art history, but not that way.

I wanted my style to be very recognizable.

I mean, part of the justification for art is art history, the fact that you're part of this tradition. You can't really operate outside of it. So looking for what this work is really about, if I look at Velázquez, if I look at Las Meninas or The Tapestry Weavers [1657] or something and really study it and try to figure out what that painting is really about, then I find relationships between what I'm trying to do and what he was doing.

The space between things is important to me. The projections, that darkness between the words or the images is very important.