When an image comes to your mind, do you always know if it will or won't be useful to your work? 

No, no, [laughs] I don't think that I know exactly what will and will not become a part of the work, or be added into like the conversation of the work. But I constantly find myself going back. Rediscovering things that I've either screenshot or saved or taken a picture of; I'm constantly saving things and constantly taking notes on my phone and texting myself when I'm out. And I don't know what they’ll become, whether they become something or not, but there's no way of knowing what becomes valid, but maybe at the time, everything is important. 

Do you make good paintings on good days and make bad paintings on bad days? 

I don't know. I don't know when it’s a good day or a bad day… some days go by really fast and things are just working out and going just as planned, but the same can happen on a day when everything's going completely wrong. And, you know, you make a move or a decision that changes the painting for the better, so great paintings can come out of bad air. 

So do you feel like your work is personal? 

I think that's a tricky question because I think that my work is highly personal, and feels personal to me, but it's communicated through this universal language of nostalgia and symbolism. So, I think that it becomes familiar to the viewer and becomes a part of their own language or memory, and it becomes less about me and my own interaction with the work. It's open because the language is so open.

Do your paintings feel familiar to you? Do you feel like you're making something you've seen before?  

Yeah. I think that what I'm trying to communicate are visual ideas that I've seen, or that seemed familiar in my memory; the paintings exist in this realm of suburban American culture… that is the language that I know, and it's very California and, you know, watching the news and being aware of certain things that are happening around us environmentally all fall into the work that I'm making. And some work is jokey and funny and maybe a play on an advertisement, but a lot of the work is heavier… I think about news clippings on top of maybe something that I've seen in an abandoned lot as a teenage skateboarder or something of that nature.  

What is it about Winona Ryder that you love? 

Um, she's just an icon. She's a style icon, you know, I think that to me, she was just so cool. Growing up and watching movies with her in it, I always thought she had the best style and I try to dress like Winona Ryder, which sounds lame. But I don’t know, maybe there's something about me trying to be semi, uh, out of reach or not have my face on everything that I make, because the internet is such a strange place to exist on. So that's why I use Winona Ryder for every single, um, what's that called? Avatar! Like Venmo or PayPal or Instagram or all these things. It's just, you know, she's cool. 

And what is it about mustard?

I also just have to say that my parents told me that that wasn't a picture of me on my Instagram. Like, they thought that I thought that the picture of Winona Ryder was me and I used it (for my Instagram avatar). They said, “what is this? why do you have this picture of this person? That's not you?” And then some people will go, “Hey, he looks a lot like Winona Ryder” It's like, yeah, it's Winona Ryder. What do you expect? 

And, um, mustard is…yeah, mustard’s just got it all.