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

As an artist - I'm sure like most creative people - you have a kind of board of directors that you make your work for. It's a group of people that you have, these friends, and you want to know what they think. In a weird way, you're making the work for them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.