I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.

I find that all these subjects that I'm dealing with tend to lead me to religion and politics one way or another. It's not something that I necessarily want to address, but it seems like it's screaming at me to pay attention to it.

I can't come up with the titles. My wife hates my titles. She doesn't even want to know about them.

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.

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.

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.

The ebb and flow as an artist is a bizarre experience, for sure. I was lucky enough to become successful pretty young - in late '79, 1980 - with a body of work that got recognized and became an archetype.