I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image.

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 liked the idea of the words floating in space and the space behind it moving all the time, ever changing.

I'm always looking for relations between my work and the old masters.

Whatever came out came out. That was it. That's what you live with. If you don't like it, that's your problem.

And when you see artists like Donald Judd and so forth being referred to as conceptual, what the hell does that mean? It's a totally meaningless term.

So it sort of dawned on me that you have to build into your work the fact that it's going to be shown in different kinds of places and different kinds of light. And the fact that the surroundings and where you're going to be shown is always changing, so that should really not affect the meaning of the work. It should be part of what the work is about.