Los Angeles [had] a lot to do with
my
feeling about about art and the world and everything I
came from sort of a
almost backward place in Oklahoma when I came to California it was very
sparkly, glamorous, and so it was like a new world to me, an accelerated culture that I
responded to
The real vitality for me is to be in my own studio, in my own environment
I'm constantly moving
wherever I work and like I might work here for a while, and then I'll
I'll move this to somewhere else
Sometimes I'll work on
four or five things at the same time
To the point where I don't know what direction i'm going in or but that's that's also exhilarating at the same time
I think I sent it on words because
first of all they had no
no size
So if I painted the word boss, I could paint it that big or I could paint that big and I like that
That you could be realistic and at the same time not be bound by any kind of reference, size reference
And I also like the sort of left-to-right kind of thing
You know our eyes are like this and we read like this and landscapes are like this
Well, I had a studio on Western Avenue in Hollywood, and I would walk outside
I'd look up in the hills and there was the Hollywood sign. Looking at that every day
I just thought well I should make a comment on it
It's also got these things left to right, it's got those words
It's got those letters and it also had that sort of corny magic to it. Just the idea of Hollywood
It's always been a symbol, a potent symbol
Backgrounds to me are simply
just that, backgrounds, and they're more like stage settings
Can almost be like elevator music. You know, where you're just like
accenting or you're kind of setting a stage or setting a tone for a
given subject
So I use stencils too. Like see this is a stencil here
that's not even the finished work, but
begins to make a kind of a lively picture
it's hard to read that but it says 'Car Parts'
I like the tension of having a
combination of words or a word in front of something that is also
lively in itself like a mountaintop
And a lot of these mountaintops, they
suggest glory
or beauty, things like that
They almost like have their own
Orchestration you know you can almost hear
trumpets playing and I like that reference
It's sort of a nonverbal way of referencing something that is is really not making any noise at all
But then
put in combination with words that that tension is is is where I'm where I live I guess