That blank sheet of paper stage is one of the hardest stages, and one of the reasons it’s hard is because at that stage there’s nobody counting on you but yourself. Today it’s easy because we’ve got millions of customers counting on us, and thousands of investors counting on us, and thousands of employees all counting on each other. In that beginning stage it’s really just you, and you can quit any time. Nobody is going to care, so you set about doing the simple things first.

With a lot of fear and trepidation. It’s totally improvisational because I work with collage, and cut up found warehouse paintings. I’ll sometimes stick a fragment or two on, and just try to figure out where to go from there. I’ve begun to think that I make each piece so differently from the other, and I don’t think that’s the way the art world likes things at this point. I think they like increments of change. While you would know it’s my work, I think I just always liked the challenge of how I’m going to compose. I get myself into a lot of trouble and hot water, and I just have to work on it, and work on it. I think that’s why some of my paintings are so awkward and odd, because I’ve had to deal with mistakes that I’ve made, and tried to correct them in some way.

No, they are three completely different processes. In film, I try to really blank out my mind when I see the film for the first time so that I have no preconceptions. Early on in my career, I tried to do all this prep or even read the script and write music, but none of it ever survived. And I realized the best way to go at it was to be as blank as I can possibly be. When I’m writing classical music, it’s much more nerve-wracking because I’m starting with nothing! And I don’t have a picture to drive me on. I am wired now, for 38 years, that I see a moving picture, I hear music, you know what I mean? But with classical, I got nothing, and at first that was totally terrifying. But I forced myself into it, and then something develops, and it becomes very liberating. With the rock music, it’s a whole different process. I mean, I can’t do anything until I get the message.

Usually one of two ways. Either I see something in the world and I’m like, “I want to make that picture,” or I see a picture and I’m like, “I want to make that painting.” And then I look for a way to make it out of stuff in my world. So I guess the first process is more, like, self-explanatory; you make some sketches, take pictures. I usually make notes about color, particularly try to get one color relationship true in the sense that the distance in terms of value or temperature of those two colors is true. Not necessarily the colors themselves, but the way they relate to each other. Make notes about that. Then come back to the studio, and maybe 10% of the time I just start working on a painting. And then maybe 30% of the time I make drawings and start that way. And then the other…is from looking at a painting and seeing a question and a solution posed by someone else, and trying to pose the same question and find the same answer, or a similar answer. And my way into that is to find a subject in my surroundings that seems structurally suitable, I guess.