What is the concept and ideology behind your art? I don’t have a specific concept or ideology. Each painting is different. I have been painting reptilians and other hybrid people for many years now. I like the associated ideas that accompany these kinds of visuals. Each animal suggests different concepts to us. Sheep are followers, lizards—well—lizards may even be aliens. Who knows?
What is your most vivid childhood memory?
I grew up in New York and we used to go to the Natural History Museum. The museum is filled with wonderful and amazing treasures. The dinosaur bones always blew me away as they have amazing life-sized dioramas of all kinds of extinct animals and early humans. But perhaps the most memorable exhibit was this life-sized giant blue whale model that hovered above you when you walked through the room. It was enormous and incredibly lifelike.
Which book or novel would best visualize your art?
Much of Haruki Murakami’s work has a similar combination of reality and surrealism that suffuses my work. I enjoy his earlier work and I think many of those novels have a connection with my paintings, such as Sputnik Sweetheart, A Wild Sheep Chase, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and 1Q84. As a matter of fact, I did the cover for his paperback version of After Dark, though it’s a very simple and graphic image.
Tell us about your most vivid dream.
When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream of a large dinosaur coming into my bedroom in the middle of the night. It was quite frightening. The room seemed to elongate as the T. Rex began to emerge through the doorway. The visual of it is still with me after all these years. There’s an effect in filmmaking where the camera operator does some trick and we feel like the visual space gets longer. This had very much that same character, though I had never seen it used in film at that point.
