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.

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.

You make the work for yourself first and the next line is the people you trust, and you know that they're going to tell you what they feel. They let you know if you're dishing bullshit or if it's real.

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas.

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.

My degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I'm carving the image out rather than painting the image. I'm carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I've always had this fondness for sculpture.

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.