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.

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.

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.

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.

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects.

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.

An artist can have an intention, but the viewer has their own subjective experience.