It's weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I'm making images of paintings out of dust.

It's been like therapy to be able to play music and not embarrass my children too much. They've come to a bunch of the shows. It's kind of cool. I'm glad they like it.

And I'm sort of deconstructing the process of what marks came first, what came later. Every aspect of the image is interesting to me to dissect and understand.

Art is a form of understanding like philosophy and science and mathematics are an understanding but the difference is that art has the capacity to hold all these different things. It is the form of understanding that is best suited for the contemporary time.

The thing that's interesting as you get older as an artist is that the biggest challenge seems to be: how do you stay relevant?

I've been dealing with epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics.

One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.