Recently, I’ve noticed that a lot of MFA students’ work is very dry – as if all their ideas have been cooked down to salt. They empty everything out and seem to be saying: I make art about not knowing what my art is about. You see a lot of this sort of posturing. It’s because there’s so much pressure on artists to make work that looks pure and anodyne and contemporary – better fit in with the system or the politbureau will condemn you. All serious artists have to deal with this. I don’t really have a problem with it – it sets limits and standards. But if artists don’t kick and push against it, that’s when it bothers me.

I’m against dryness obviously. My paintings have titles so that’s something, but I like the idea of ambiguity. My interest in a thing or an idea is general or fragmentary, but not specific because I’m not making theme-based work. I don’t want people thinking: this month he’s doing sexual repression. I mean, every month I’m doing sexual repression, same as everyone else. The most important thing for me is liking the look of the painting which means I’m a formalist.

Painting comes from nothing. It starts out being intuitive; the middle gets muddled with ideas, but hopefully it ends intuitively too. If this weren’t the case it wouldn’t be any good.

I did this drawing – The Commute – I was thinking about people standing in a forest, but at the same time I wanted them to be on a subway train – I wanted an inside-out kind of look. I used to ride the tube a lot when I lived in London. You can read a book on the way to work, be in this interior space and then look out the window and see either blackness or the outside world going by, and then you think: what an incredibly close-up place, squashed-in with all these people. It’s exhilarating, but when I start painting I’m not thinking about any of this - I’m thinking about paint and planes and space.

If you paint things there are going to be certain leitmotifs. With me it’s books, women, trees, crash helmets, etc. I like the idea of repetition – doppelgangers – and I like opposites too – the banal and the exotic, the sacred and profane. That’s why the double-up diptych format appeals to me.