When did you begin working on the sketchbooks?
I’ve been keeping books pretty much consistently since I was fourteen – which at this point is more than twenty-five years. I was very fortunate to have had good mentors as a teenager, and was introduced to keeping a daily sketchbook during high school. The practice of keeping one with me wherever I went, integrating these books in to my life, came very easily.

What are the books about?
People ask that sometimes, as though the books are some elaborate cypher I’ve created, seeing who can crack the code and decipher the meaning. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m often the last one to know what my books are about.

I developed my creative process, which leans heavily on spontaneity, to circumvent a tyrannical conscious mind. The first art school I attended offered some pretty academic and traditional training, which was great, but the experience certainly helped make my artwork more intellectually than emotionally driven. Combine that with having a strong left brain and being characteristically reticent to speak right from the heart, and you’re likely to come up with some boring-ass art. So I developed my methods in order to get around thinking about and analyzing what I was doing while I was doing it.

I’m conscious that books lend themselves to narrative; they are by their physical nature a sequential medium. So as I’m working on the books I try to create a flow from page to page. It’s possible a story would emerge, but I’ve only done one sketchbook that intentionally had a storyline. It was called “Forgetting to Call You Back,” and I created it for an Art House Cooperative exhibition called The Sketchbook Project, Volume IV.

I suppose also there’s a heavy autobiographic element to these things, since books have a very intimate feeling to them. It’s not so much that I want to make a record of the outer events of my life, which likely would hold little interest to anyone but me. The only exception to that might be the travel portions of the sketchbooks. But on the main the books are records of more internal stuff, which will hopefully touch someone who may be experiencing something similar to what they see in my work. The result of the method and the intention, I hope, is a very personal experience – both for me in creating the pieces, and for the viewer in experiencing them.

So how does your method relate to what finally goes in to the books?
The method that I use to create the imagery and generate the words is completely automatic, in the Surrealist sense. I sit in front of the books and just begin, recording whatever comes to mind. I’ll often start with some sort of random markings, either by making them myself or by starting with something I’ve found – it could even be a telephone book page – and I’ll use that as a base for the rest of the image. I continue to work on the image by either adding more things that randomly come to mind, or by responding intuitively to what’s developing on the page. It’s like looking at the sky and seeing things suggested by the shapes of the clouds.

What are your influences?
Well, there are a lot of ways I could answer that question. I’m strongly influenced by music – it’s an essential component in my working method. I respond on a very emotional level to music, and it helps me get to that place, helps that come out in the work. I love virtually all music, so I can be listening to anything from Mozart to the White Stripes to old George Jones.

From an artistic standpoint, my influences tend to be at the extremes. Again, when I was in school, much of the focus was on academic training. So I fell in love with the pure craft of the European old masters, especially Rembrandt and Velazquez. I also loved Joseph Beuys, but very few other conceptual artists. I identify with those artists that straddled the line between old and new ways of thinking; principally people who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From that period I love Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and others from the early Modern era. Obviously, there are some heavy visual influences from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Another inspiration worth mentioning is Dan Eldon, the young Reuters photographer who was killed in Somalia back in 1993. His visual journals are amazingly beautiful, and communicate an incredibly vivacious and adventurous spirit.

So what’s next?
There are many possibilities, though I don’t know yet which paths I’ll follow and which paths will remain ideas. I want to explore the limits of the sketchbook medium, experimenting with electronic media. How far can you push the physical format of a book before it ceases to be a book?

I’m also driven to work on paintings, prints, and sculpture projects. It seems my lifetime pursuit to figure out how to build a bridge between the sketchbooks and those other media.

I’ve been encouraged to consider writing a book about sketchbooks and the creative process as well. But that idea is still forming, so anything like that is still a ways off.

So you see I have quite a few ideas to consider. In the meantime I’ll continue to work on the sketchbooks and my writing.