Can you explain the three figures that make up the cover of Wide Awake!?

I don’t know if I can. I don’t know much about them myself honestly. I was listening to the album a lot while I was working on the record and I don’t know. It’s always just what comes out of me when I just immerse myself in the sounds. It’s people dancing, it’s just a clue to what you can expect from the record, but I don’t know much about them myself.

The people in a lot of your paintings are usually quite blurry. Is there a reason why you like to portray them this way?

It’s not really blurred. It’s supposed to convey movement. A lot of the inanimate things that I paint are really hard edged, so it’s mostly with the organic things that have that movement quality of line. I like to represent the moving image in that way … I’m interested in the way things move through space.

One of my favourite paintings is this Duchamp painting, a Nude Descending Staircase. It blew my mind seeing it when I was in art school, but I can’t imagine in 1911, or whenever it was, whenever he finished that painting. Seeing that painting for the first time must have been awesome because it depicts movement in painting in a way that I’ve never seen depicted in a painting before, so I’m fascinated with translating a sensation like that onto a canvas.