I think it’s a combination of being a good listener, trying to understand what lies beneath the surface. And I mean that in the most literal sense.  It could be a cultural institution. It could be an enterprise. It could be a site. It could be the culture of feng shui in an Asian society. The things that you can measure and the things that you can’t measure. And it’s about drawing on the best of diverse skills, the reality that an architect cannot design and realize a building independent of engineers, skilled engineers, structural engineers, environmental engineers. So for me, it’s about harnessing the creative energies. It’s not about designing a building and handing it out and saying, “You make it stand up. You make it warm. You make it cool.” It’s about getting those skills in unison.  The analogy is perhaps a round table, which is non-hierarchical. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t have strong leadership. Obviously, you have to have that; otherwise, it’s designed by committee. So it’s answering the material needs and providing an element of surprise, something that perhaps nobody believed might be possible to add. And it’s not about money. Quality is an attitude of mind. It’s not about how much you spend. It’s about how wisely you spend. You’ve really got three ingredients. You’ve got material resources, money; you’ve got time, and in many cases, time is money; and you’ve got creative energy. And it’s the creative energy that is going to make the difference in terms of those other ingredients.

Sometimes I start a story with just a feeling. Often it is a place or an image. A house, a tree, a mountain. A sentence or a phrase. Sometimes it is like a line of music, a tone. Sometimes it is a character. It’s happened a couple of times that I start from one of those places and work for a few days or weeks and one morning I will wake up with a sentence that makes me realize that one of my new characters could be related to one of the characters I wrote about 45 stories ago. Something in my unconscious mind will weave those people together and put them in the same place. Sometimes I find a way to cast an image or tone, attach it to a character I’ve already worked with. Something in me wants to connect layers over time… not just families but friendships over time, over generations. I think a lot about how we build community over time or place. Sometimes it seems that I can’t work on a project really hard without connecting it to this gigantic web that I constructed over the years.

When I start out to make a panoramic piece, I often work from left to right. But when a small scrap of a drawing turns into a giant drawing the progress is less linear, a more intuitive process. “Untitled (Color Kitchen)” started with the flowers. Mariah Corrigan cut me these beautiful old roses, which I put in a yellow pitcher. The next day I was all packed up and walking out the door to go to my studio when I saw the roses and thought, “Those flowers are going to be gone by tomorrow.” So I stayed home and painted them just to always remember them. Eventually the drawing grew to include the table, the wall, the curtain, and the next wall

Well, it’s very simple for me. It’s pretty much always the same. I might have certain things swimming around in my head. We all always do. What’s been on your mind lately? You could ask anybody that, and you’d get a couple of answers. But, I always jump in. I always just try to think of a first sentence. Well, actually, I decide firstly if it’s going to be in third person or first person. And then I just think of something, I just get something moving.