You’ve authored two books now, do you see yourself continuing in that path?
Absolutely, yeah, I hope to have my next book out in the spring of 2010. I hope that it will be bigger and better, and more interesting and provocative and shameful, and everything else that I have done in the last two. I really feel like my second book, From The Murks Of The Sultry Abyss, was a step up from the first one [Fluffy White Clouds], I hope that they will continue to progress in the direction that they are progressing. There will definitely be a lot more paintings in the next book, I spent the better part of the last year working on my first solo art installation [Ectoplasm] in Los Angles.
You’re a painter, author, how do you determine which avenue of expression you should take?
It’s not an easy answer. Every artist has a different process, but music, drawing, photography, they come from nothing and that’s what wonderful about them. I literally will just get this feeling that I just want to paint, so I will pull out my tools and everything and a big white piece of canvas, then six hours later there’s an image there that doesn’t really make any sense, and then a few weeks later or month later, I will look at it differently or I will catch it in a certain light and it makes perfect sense. For me, writing lyrics or songs is really the same thing, I could be having a bowl of cereal, and I look at a guitar sitting in my living room and I will have this overwhelming urge to pick it up and I discover some chords that I never played before. I am not a very good guitar player, so I am sort fascinated if I find a new guitar chord and a whole song will emerge out of it.
Steven King once said that they are all just fossils that we’re dusting off.
Yeah, I like that. I guess he’s alluding to the notion that there is really no original art, we are all just taking from an infinite number of the same influences. Like on a guitar there are a finite number of frets and strings, but an infinite number of combinations that you could put them into to create something that no one has ever heard before. Like with language, you’re reaching into a finite number of letters and a finite number of words and putting them together into an infinite number of combinations that might end up fascinating people or might end up angering people. That’s completely fascinating to me.
