I write mostly in my bedroom. I don’t have a desk. I have at least 10 or 12 books that I’m reading at the time around me and I flip through different things. I have poems that I’m reading on my computer and I flip through those. I usually start by journaling. I journal every night, and that’s where most of my poems come from. Or notes in my phone that I pick through and Frankenstein morph into poems. In the end, it’s just me trying to boil down my gibberish and self-recriminations into some destruction and rebirth of me trying to give flesh to my memories.

A typical day is probably lots of meetings and stuff. But if it’s an idea that we’re developing, what might happen is I might talk to some of the people in the lab, maybe have them come in the office and brainstorm with them, and say, “Well, here’s a problem that we need to solve,” or need to solve better. So just as an example, when I had this idea that we could create better materials, I got about four or five people together with different backgrounds — chemistry, engineering, safety, toxicology — and we started putting chemical structures on the blackboard and say, “Well, this might work,” or “This might not be safe,” and ended up with certain structures that we thought would be good. And then, one of the guys would go out and try to make those structures, and we’d go from there.

Concepts can be really freeing in their limitations. I really enjoy when I make rules for myself in my creative practice. Whether that means I’m going to try and write a song without the use of the word “I,” I like having rules in my songs. Even if I don’t follow them exactly, it’s kind of nice to have a very loose guideline. And then when I try to create that universe for myself, I at least can visualize the path that I’m trying to follow.

You would think my work would be like Warhol’s and others since I have spent so much time in and around that crowd. Well, I’m not a very good modern artist in the sense that my life is not part of my art. I think that Warhol was idea-driven. He was always looking for good ideas. I’m more intuitive; I respond to what I love. I see something beautiful, and I want to paint it. That’s how I work.