There’s always a line to walk, I think. I think that’s why I’ve been able to sustain support through the years—I’m pretty good at walking a line.

I have interest in both worlds. I’m equally enchanted by the hyper-Hollywood world of the internet and all that bullshit as I am by a 15th-century painting, and where that thing has been hidden for 200 years, and why that painter made that painting, and why it got forgotten about, and why it’s so obscure.

I’m a poet, I’m a romantic. I’m into nature and being holistic in a lot of ways. My spirituality has more to do with my connection to nature and meditation and things like that.

That overlap [between worlds] is funny, too, because that’s what the Kardashians are doing. They’re being holistic, and meditating, and talking about anxiety management in your life, and being your authentic self, and being true to your friends, and not compromising in business or your morals.

I think that maybe is why it was really hard for people to understand that body of work right away, and continues to be, because what I’m taking from them is the opposite of what people see them as.

It started through Instagram posts or stories. A lot of my creative dialogue and discourse starts there, in a sense. I’m putting these ideas out there, and how I’m developing them often comes through on my Instagram Story in these abstract ways. When I started doing all this Kendall stuff, I could feel immediately my views going down, or people would stop engaging, or they’re like, “Dude, stop, this is so annoying.”

I was also making paintings of Koko the gorilla at the time. It was Koko being filmed on a daily basis, so it was kind of set up like the Kardashians, like a reality show. Every day they’re recording her, and they’re like, “Oh my God, she’s doing this today, she’s making a nest, she’s doing these interesting things.” She would want to look at her books, talk about people or whatever.

It was this interesting parallel. [Gallerist] David Fierman was like, “Yeah, I think this could be really cool and interesting and weird.” He really let me follow my natural investigation of these things, and we were able to put them together in a room in a way that felt really articulate and brought a lot of the concept into a space that felt a little more serious.

That’s what the Kendall stuff was for me. It’s really a complex space to be in as an artist when everybody that is a successful artist now is branding. They’re just branding their identity and their personality and all these things. Why is that any different from a supermodel? How do we grapple with this at a time when the sales are what keep us all alive?

As an artist, you’re like, “Oh, cool, people are finally getting it. They’re adopting what I am as an artist.” That’s such a limiting path to walk. It really can put you in a place where you’re now the painter that does that, and that’s all that sells, that’s all galleries want.

I think everybody goes into it knowing that it’s a trap, but they still do it because otherwise every curator’s like, “What’s your voice? What’s your POV? Why does this make you you?”

Then it becomes, I think, even more than ever about the person behind the art. “I’m buying it because I want to be around that cool person and what they’re doing.” That comes back right to aura, and how that’s developed or established or manufactured is still something that people are trying to figure out.

It’s the thing behind the thing—that intangible sort of charisma around an artist’s work.

I feel an obligation to totally acknowledge that and do everything I can to make sure that I execute it in a timely fashion, because I know that in a year from that idea everybody will be caught up, and they’ll think that I was a part of a trend, like I’m just hopping on the bandwagon.

I think that’s a hard part of trusting your vision. If it seems obscure, or it seems easily criticized, you have to set that trend and take that lashing. If people think it’s stupid or corny—the art world is really scathing. And I know that because I am. I’m really critical of what people do and say in the art world.

I feel responsible to expose these ideas in a way that doesn’t feel light. It feels like it’s giving true and genuine attention to something like the Kendall stuff, or Kai, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s just internet shit. That’s just mainstream.”

At that time when I did the show, really nobody that I would talk to would know who that was.

He reminded me of the power of the artist. We are the ones that create all this, and without the artist, you’re nothing.

I’m saying this while also being like, “I’d love for someone to represent me this year,” but we don’t need these studios to co-sign us, or to market us, or even be our distributors.

I’ve been upstate a bunch this summer, developing some projects up there and really doing studio work—en plein air, drawing, and all those sorts of things—which has really been great for my practice. It’s really special to be able to have that time and to be in nature.

But then I come back, and I hit the streets, and I go out, and I run into people that are the most impactful people in the world right now, and they’re the homies that you see on the block. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, this is why it’s important to be in New York every day.”

I’ve lived downtown for 13 years now. Prior to that, I had tried to live in Brooklyn, in Sunset Park and Brooklyn Heights. I never felt that connected to the people in the city, to the scene. I kept on leaving. I would be like, “I don’t know how to get a job. I don’t know how to get in the art world. I don’t even know when an opening is. What do you do after the opening? You just go home? I didn’t talk to anybody. I’m too nervous.”

Being here, and being in it, and being downtown was something that I really had to unlock. I had to recognize it, just being like, “Where do I feel happy? Where do I feel like my time here matters?” And it’s downtown, walking out my door.

When I landed in the LES, going to shows in Chinatown—that was everything. I was like, “Holy shit, this is the coolest shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” People come from all over the world, dressing crazy, and are tapped into some shit that I clearly have not tapped into yet. I was just really so impressed by the aura of what Chinatown was in those days.

When I was making all that Kendall stuff and doing a lot of this silkscreen work, I was making these really slick-looking objects that were stripped down and cool and sexy.

I was taking imagery and using its already loaded nature in the cultural vernacular, and putting that into context in a way that felt more substantial. I was like, “Alright, I’m packaging this really complex idea because people are having a hard time with the idea. Just make it look sick. Make it look sexy and cool.” In doing so, I created this world that started to feel maybe a little overly aestheticized, or too focused on the aesthetics of the work, which felt like a little bit of a trap for me.

People were still not believing in the work, or believing in the significance of what I’m doing, or the seriousness of what I’m putting into creating these works. I guess I’ve got to prove it to them.

Despite having been a painter for many years—10 years, or 12, or 15, or whatever—I really started painting two years ago and learning about all of these techniques to create works that were still loaded in the world of my reckoning, but were being delivered in a medium that people in the art world understand and a language that they speak.

I was thinking about painting so conceptually, and thinking about appropriation as painting, and Richard Prince making Instagram paintings. I was like, “Dude, that’s where painting is to me right now.”

Then I learned about historical painting, and I learned about knowing in painting. When artists use techniques in paintings, you show how much you know about painting in a painting.

These formal, fundamental techniques that I had not learned yet were becoming these really exciting indicators of what goes into making work, and how a master comes to look effortless in their execution through years of practice and getting really good at understanding light and using materials.

Then it started to become about capturing aura. The thing that I started to understand that I loved about paintings was painters that were able to capture light.

Yes, there’s subject matter, there are things happening, but the way those ideas or those emotions are delivered is through the way a painter uses light in a scene.

I’m a really process-based artist, and everything that I do has a lot of rigor in the process and understanding everything that goes into it.

How do I make an allegorical painting shine and feel luminous, like a gemstone, like these works I’m looking at from the 1400s? Why are they glowing? Why do they look like they’re illuminated from within? Why are these colors so rich and still so popping and crazy?

It was about understanding the materiality of those surface preparations, which is something that, in a weird way, I’ve been doing my whole life through the industrial contracting that I did with my father’s company.

It was all steel preparation—stripping steel infrastructure to basically recoat it for it to last into the future another 50, 100 years. You’re stripping things down, you’re preparing your surface to accept layers—a coating system is how they talk about it. That’s what they were doing back then.

You make a linen panel using rabbit-skin glue to adhere your linen to the surface of wood. You want materials that are going to last and be able to deal with temperature shifts and humidity. You want pliability.

You make the gesso using marble dust, and you create the surface, and then you use a lead ground. The reflectivity of lead in paint is what makes luminosity come from behind a painting, forward through the optical layers of glazing. It’s being lit from behind.

People are like, “Your paintings, there’s just something to them. They really glow.” They’re doing this thing that people can’t put their finger on.

It really is all just a matter of following my intuition and my desire to make things beautiful. That really is the core of it all: to create beautiful things that are transformational or transcendent in their experience.