I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.

I love to play humorous moments in dramatic shows. That's always the most fun: to keep the logic of the character in a show that's basically action-adventure and then play the comedy moments.

I think that for the most part, when I started doing comedy, it had become very commercialized.

I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I'm good at everything but because I'm not good at any of these things.

The reason most comedies don't win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.