Connect What is your favorite type of art to create?

Painted. Surrealism and sequential (comicbook illustration). But the general through line in all my work, no matter what type of art or what media I use, is storytelling. I start from a story in my head and work an image out from that, without necessarily offering an explanation of the source, like a portrait from another universe. I think I got that from listening to Bowie all my life. He kind of did that with songs and that excited a curiosity in me, that I now emulate in paintings.

Where do you find inspiration?

Dreams. I read a theory from Francis Crick in 1983 about dream sleep being comparable to defragmenting a computer hard drive. That sleep cleanses the brain and reduces the strength of certain memory traces. It just made dreams more fascinating to me; "Why did my brain think these things were unhealthy, dangerous or useless/" Since then, if I remembered a dream and it had anything close to a cohesive story, I would work it out in a series of paintings to see what I could discover.

What would you do with $25,000?

As a thought experiment, I was recently asked to consider what I would do (artistically) with my "last year of life". I immediately made a list of projects (graphic novels and art books, mostly) that I considered possible to complete and publish in 1 year. Some of these projects have been started over the years and are in various stages of development. I would finish them all, publish, and any profit made from them would go to National Art Education Foundation and The Planetary Society.