I think the best way to describe it is when I was a younger artist and I was making marks on a page, there were marks that when I got them right, they had a certain quality and I couldn’t describe to you what that quality is, but I just knew it was authentic and it was right.
The place that I encountered similar marks was in Asian art — in Japanese paintings, landscape painting and calligraphy — and Chinese painting. There was something about those marks that was very alike — the work that I was making and the work that they were making. I wanted to know more about the culture that produced people who would make that kind of work.
I kind of entered into an interest in Asian art sort of from the surface down and I became more interested in the people and the culture and the spiritual life of people in the East. It’s interwoven now through all of my work and my life.