I read that prior to the advent of color TV, most people dreamed in black and white.
I always thought being an artist was a lazy job. I was wrong.
We discard the personal specifics which don't conform to the ideal conventional beauty created by art directors and cinematographers.
I love seeing things that work in the micro and work in the macro.
When we as a society lose the ability to comment on what we see and to have an opinion on what we are exposed to, then we have all lost what makes us unique on this planet.
I dont think I talk to anybody the same way I talk to Moby.
The advent of the digital age and the immediacy and convenience of digital video and photography allows people to become an integral part of the feedback loop which actively shapes the content we are fed.
Beauty has became a pejorative word in art. It was not something one should aspire to, because it was pedestrian. Beautiful things became cheap and easy. If it's cheap and easy, then upper classes aren't going to aspire to it. So, they have to find something more esoteric. I wanted the paintings to be realistic enough that you would have the ability to forget that I'm showing them to you.
I've always wished that I had a great ability to verbalize art theory and find a way that I fit in to the whole lineage, but I don't have a clue.
I try to write art theory down and understand it but I'm not a writer. I don't want to impress people with my writing. I'd rather impress people with my ability to see and feel it and then share that.
Photorealism says: to fool your eye. That isn't what I've been interested in doing.
We're making so many images today and it's unbelievable. I shoot stuff all the time. I try to figure a lot out before I paint. I do a tremendous amount of shooting.
Every show I've done, I've just wanted to understand something of this weird life that I woke up in. I've never woken up in anyone else's life, so I've got to understand this one. The only skill I was given is this painting.
I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.
There's the people who have one of these cell phones in their pockets and don't have a clue how it's made. But I really want to understand.
All I want to do is realism and follow the tradition of realism. And explore what realism should be now be after the ubiquity of smartphones. I'm trying to answer the question. I don't think I'll ever have the words, but hopefully I'll have a few images.
I wanted to finally feel better about understanding. I painted my wife because I wanted to understand her. I can talk to her, but I didn't understand why I was so compelled.
I started getting afraid of dying. I don't have any religion and I wanted to understand something about these greater powers without anthropomorphizing it.
Photorealism was this fantastic movement in like the late '60s and '70s, because photography finally became something that everyone could produce. Photorealism was and should've been a very short element. But the thing is, photography is so satisfying. Certainly when it's well done.
I don't try to force-feed it or put any things on the images until I'm making a painting. It's not photorealism. Photorealism's goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can't beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer. I don't want to go blind doing what a printer can do.
It's been so much a part of my life the thinking that I go through is crucial. I found that if I don't paint for around a week, I get practically suicidal. It took a long time to figure out why I had these mood swings, and I finally figured out it's because I haven't painted.
Star Wars came out when I was seven. It was so different from anything else, like peeking into the land of Oz. All you wanted to do was see it again and go back and see more of it. That feeling is not easy to reproduce. Eventually, you give up and try to recreate that feeling yourself.
I'm interested in visual vocabulary, like Andy Warhol was interested in that vocabulary of advertisements and television and pop culture. I do a great deal of tropes. This past decade has seen a new term, "meme," which is exactly what I'm studying.
Every time I have people over, I watch how long they look at every part of the painting, or pictures on my computer. I have a few close friends and people that are constants. Whether I like their opinion or not, I've been hearing it for a long time and I can use it as this constant. I mentally pay attention to how long they look at every image, which ones they pause on and what parts of it they look at.
The landscape is one of the kinds that I think, at least this body of work is the least selfish of the stuff that I've done. It's all selfish. It is making images of things that I want to see, that turn me on, that make me happy, that satisfy me.
