People often assume that because I love what I do, I must enjoy doing all that I do. That is completely untrue. There is an awful lot of painting that is completely un-fun. I can, in all honestly, tell you that cutting all of these letters out of blue masking tape really, deeply and truly sucks. But the idea of what this is going to look like when it's finished is the thing that pulls me through the monotonous labor parts. (I mean, when these paintings are finished, they're going to be amazing. Obviously.) In grad school, John Brown gave a talk and he said: "I don't like painting. I like paintings." He is more or less exactly right. Most of a painting is work. A lot of that work is NOT fun. But what is amazing (and highly addictive) is the feeling you get when you make something awesome: when you create something beautiful that didn't exist before. That's the best thing ever, and it's why I do what I do.
That and also that I feel a sense of responsibility to the voices in my head that tell me to do these things.
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