I attempt to create a world that hypnotizes me as I make it. I hope others can get lost in it in the same way, but to be honest, I don't care that much. It isn't like a basketball player is out on the court hoping that people like the game of basketball as the game goes on. If people don't see it, they don't see it. It is a fragile thing and most people recognize that and respect it. Even if for whatever reason, they don't like the painting.
What do you know about music, you're not a lawyer?
When I was about 17 I knew that I was going to be serious about music. Before that I thought, fairly certainly, that I would be a writer. Before that, I thought I would be a forward in the NBA. And before that I thought that I would own a snake farm.
I play music, I paint - these things come from your depths.
I start out making my paintings for me. I don't see it as a form of communication. Until, of course, after they are done and I want people to see them. And want them to be recognized. But while I am making them I just try to get lost in them. Kind of like it's a prayer.
It seems like there are always gatekeepers. People between you and the people who are moved by your work. They often make a beautiful thing creepy.
The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.
I'd always maintained an image so that people wouldn't approach me.
If someone who knows what's going on comes up and says they liked the music, I appreciate that.
I think humor is actually a very serious thing. I think the people who shaped culture, for the better, in the last 50 years or so, more than almost anyone else are people like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and even Chris Rock, back when he was doing the edgier stuff.
But, you know, I'd be happy just making music.
I remember seeing McCoy Tyner in concert, and thinking that the music was incredible, but wanting to be invited in. I figured that humor was the way of letting the audience in. I've gotten a hard time about it, but I love to be funny onstage.
The loss of music is very painful, and I don't revisit stuff unless there is a solid reason to do it.
There are people clamoring for the election of Donald Trump because they hate anyone whose skin is a slight shade different than theirs. They are calling for the eradication of Islam and want to build a wall along an arbitrary line that keeps Mexicans out of the land they probably have more of a right to cross than the people who now somehow think they have a right to be there.
I feel cleaner on the days where I am painting as opposed to the periods when I am not, that is certain to me. In a sense it is a transfiguration, what comes at me in my life or what I see going on in the world comes out as something beautiful or hopefully beautiful.
I think the Native Americans had the right idea about preserving and respecting the earth. Not just using it up. We are not the center of the universe and that we think we are will most likely be the end of us. Then nature will go on its way, with humans only being a faint ugly memory. And yes I am fond of animals or most of them.
I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.
I guess I just want everything to be available immediately.
I don't really stay away from politics but the bullshit just gets to be too much. Any political tweets I take down after an hour or so. They are met with such a wall of stupidity and anger, it is hardly worth it to leave it up. Particularly, if you say anything about Hillary Clinton, the responses are just nuts - "YOU JUST FEAR SMART, STRONG WOMEN, MR. MAN".
