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 over twenty 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?
Honestly, I’m the last one to know. The books and the method by which I create them is little more than an attempt 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 being a control freak and characteristically reticent to speak right from the heart, and you’ve got a recipe for some boring-ass art. So I developed my methods in order to get around thinking about, and analyzing too much, what I was doing when I was doing it. The big challenge for the future will be to bring some of that freshness, energy, and openness to larger paintings. So far it’s just seemed more natural to work in the book format, so that’s comprised the main body of my artwork for the past several years.

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 sort of 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 instinctually to what’s developing on the page. Sort of like seeing things in 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, I’ve got influences all over the board. 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 probably feel most identified with those artists that also 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 many others from the early Modern era. Obviously, there are some heavy visual influences from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Another inspiration worth mention is definitely 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?
More books, really. I’ve decided for now to only show the most recent ones, but I may go back and pick up excerpts from some of the older sketchbooks. I’ll also be working toward figuring out where the synthesis is between what I can achieve with the books, and larger works outside that format. Aside from that, just life stuff.