Creating each painting is a pursuit of excellence for me, and I often find myself revisiting them even after considering them "finished." Achieving the highest quality is a driving force in my artistic process.

I guess, above all, I consider myself to be a figurative painter. To me, it's the most challenging and the most rewarding direction for a painter to take. It requires good compositional skills, i.e., working in the abstract and a mastery of technique to create a slice of the world that seems real but also imaginary.

I don't deliberately try to make a statement or convey a message with my work either. I'm attracted to light and color, and that's what I try to reproduce in my paintings. I want to make images that are interesting to look at, both up close and from a distance. Whatever emotion or meaning may come through happens as a by-product, and as a result, I was the one wielding the brush and mixing the colors. One of my favorite quotes by an artist that illustrates that I am by no means unique in how I regard my work comes from Edward Hopper, who famously said: "What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."