Is it true that you initially considered a career in animation?

Yeah.

How, or why, did you make the switch to art?

When I started at SVA I was in illustration, and I was a fan of Marshall Arisman. I thought he was making interesting images in the early ’80s, and when I met him, he was very generous and kind to me. Then [BFA Fine Arts Chair] Jeanne Siegel called me into her office and said, “You know, you really should be in fine art. You’re too rebellious and restless to listen to other people’s ideas.”

And I did switch, and I started painting because one of my teachers, before I switched, taught a class where we copied Old Master paintings. I can’t remember her name. But I had copied this [Gustave] Courbet portrait. I had never made a painting before, and I enjoyed it enough to think, “Well, maybe painting is it.”

I was sort of intuitively aware that painting was happening around the East Village and stuff like that. And of course the SVA celebrities at that point were Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. If they can get their shit together and make a living, then why not me?

Were there any other faculty who had an impact on your work or how you thought about it?

Lorraine O’Grady showed me that there was a way of framing art history through this intellectual lens that appealed to me. My mom was an archaeologist and academic, and I wanted the support of ideas behind what I was doing. I don’t know if it’s justified, but there’s a lot of baggage with painting, like it’s only done by idiots or narcissists. I wanted my work to be, like, “social activist” and smart. The other teacher I had who was very influential was the late Lisa Liebmann.

They would introduce me to the post-structuralists and the Frankfurt School and Roland Barthes and people like that, who were very fashionable with some of the younger artists in the East Village, and I sort of ended up migrating down to Nature Morte and International with Monument and galleries like that.

How did your career start?

I first showed at a gallery called Patrick Fox in 1985 and sold most of those paintings. Then I was friendly with Jay Gorney, who was the director of another gallery. Several other artists encouraged him to open his own gallery, which would be showing so-called “smart” paintings and post-conceptual objects. I was in the opening group show there in 1986 and that was the beginning. I was 24.

I’ve been very lucky that people were interested in what I was interested in. Like two months after I started painting, someone wanted me to make a painting for them. Then I was [former SVA faculty member] Ross Bleckner’s assistant, and got to see how a professional studio worked. Then before I knew it, I was sort of around people like Julian Schnabel and Barbara Kruger and Troy Brauntuch and David Salle. All these people were sort of in the air, and [the art world] didn’t seem like this far-off place. It seemed like just a matter of time before I was going to be in the same position.

Now, obviously you could be delusional and very sorely mistaken. But I just had the will and the work ethic to do it.

Is there anything that you want to tell current students?

The thing about being in the city is that it’s so great to be in school and doing whatever you’re doing, and then literally you can walk down the street and see a place where you want to end up, professionally. I think so much of being or doing anything in life is really about having the imagination and belief that it’s possible.