What do you think of when you think of the word “flesh”?

Trying to eat less meat; the Chardin still-life “The Ray,” which I haven’t looked at in years; after finding the painting again online: the expression of the fish, which conveys the sight of death; the pigs’ heads I saw hanging in a market in Nanjing a few years ago; a photo my wife Laura took in Mexico City recently of a chef riding his bike with a pig’s head sticking out of a milk crate attached to the seat; the first time I went fly-fishing, about ten years ago, and how I tried but did not succeed at removing the hook from the fish’s mouth gracefully.

What do you find thrilling?

Public speaking; certain kinds of sex; driving in heavy traffic; driving in the desert; sitting down for an elaborate meal; asking Laura to marry me; being at the point in a painting or piece of writing where I see the end and have momentum; receiving mail; beauty; combinations of colors that “sing”; getting something I really wanted; not getting something I really wanted.

What is your favorite texture?

The fur of my longhaired cat Celine.

What is one thing you think will never change?

The power of color.

Your artwork often incorporates textual elements among the visual. What does blurring these two genres mean to you?

I have been trying to meaningfully answer this question for a few years, in part because it’s a little made-up that artists really know why they are doing what they do. But a short answer might be: there are other languages spoken in a painting — color and shape — and I felt, when I first started to think about screen-printing my writing onto my canvases, that there was no reason to exclude written language.

To risk a stickier answer, painting is a zone where one can attempt, through an invented process, to reconcile difficult contradictions. For instance, a lot of art contains both the desire to make art and a hatred of art. And this is maybe a way to deal with a larger disharmony in life, which contains a spectrum between wanting to live and a hatred of living. But by bringing written and painting languages together, I am testing a different set of contradictions that feel present to me: between speaking and silence, between clarity and mystery, between the duration of narrative and the immediacy of image.