so i guess this is a two part question what inspired you to become an artist and how did you become an artist i know we discussed this earlier but you know for the camera and bits of work that will produce work and money for two three years and then they kind of peter out and dry up and you have to plan the next project did to japan connection for us just keeps getting travelling on other people's money is is really a lot of fun it's a much different experience in japan to be working there instead of visiting and tourist thing  you get to see really a whole separate part of japan and we've been doing that for university in the fifty's there were these enormous lending library school a sucker or a sucker read books and because they never thought people would would actually b thought to preserve them they all got recycled so even though there were tens of millions of these books none of them were were saved because they were so common so you know what has inspired me  it's a great way to make a living at not it's not for everybody because the benefits are like zero years back getting a mortgage or any kind of credit this was impossible the health insurance is zero you know everybody always says oh gee i must be great being your own boss but everybody that works in the door with a commission is your boss so it's like having six thousand bosses so i just keep chasing different things like this paper or it's my new toy i really spent too much time doing it because it can it takes so much time and i can't really sell it but i'm starting to think i should sell it because people are constantly asking how much it is and  some final fantasy so i mean money tireless spend doing that and not doing the work actually can make money doing but it's not all about money business in twenty mile radius of new brunswick rutgers and it got to the point where we were making six eight hundred at a time and it was it was like working  factory it became less fun it was an exotic good silk screen printing it was printing and printing and printing and so there's a point where we had to buy a machinery and buy a building hire people and we didn't want to do that by the time i was getting so i say real work real work so he said well just keep the really interesting stuff and that never works it's like the people who say they'll do their art on the weekend you just never get to it if you don't if you don't make a commitment you just never get to it and so we that ended our teacher business which was fine  consider quality and that's what i see in everything i do it's the mistakes that i should have done this i should have done then is there something that inspires you to create something maybe you build upon it well i think it's reasonable really bit graphic artist is i have to work entirely by inspiration right i get the entire picture and process in i can't really i can because i have a lot of technical skills but i can't i don't really like the work i do i demand like graphic art luckily i don't have to i'm really bad at it so i don't think i do very well doing it years and years ago one of the most important people you ever met was yoko on that day when my biggest regrets and one of my biggest  stayed at back then and i would see her all the time at the museum and well the look woman in day to day was not quite the cook and at the time i was doing a very technical acrylic painting and trying to get my breast stroke is just as flat as they could be which is difficult and that was what i was really working on was getting my technical acrylic expertise and not really having a lot of fun it's really hard it was i didn't really like doing it all that much and she did a installation there which she likes to do  called tuna fish luncheon and what she did was set a place setting for luncheons with tuna fish sandwiches coffee water tea and then she had four women come out and eat half the meal and then she came out they left she came out and put a blindfold on and took a baseball bat and smears to everything on the table hung it on the wall t and thinking so much and just kind of followed the ideas i had the inspirations i had pictures i had and just from one thing the next and it's worked out really well the only thing i regret about that time is i kept hoping and with a good manager john lennon there did very few paintings most of them are modern art i think he donated twenty six paintings of his life he was a toll collector and book carrier or something and he came to paris and he was going to be an artist and he'd quickly get disillusioned with artists and or he just thought it was a bunch of bull so he only painted for a couple years and went back to his job in the tokyo with and were it was and he did  but i mean he's he's not really well known i really like his work  but that's an example of who i like the you know the things like borehole who was who was just really getting go in new york when we were there in the late seventy's early eight i mean his favorite saying was you know or is whatever you can get away with and that was it he was a real he was a real go getter and mostly going getting everybody else's money as much as he could  and i'm not sure if he thought what he did was all crap and he certainly was not oppressed by it it was more of a business and a lifestyle for him  so i mean a lot of what he did i think is more like graphic or the terms of big names like they're not really inspired by a lot of in the picasso or you know that kind of school but i'm more inclined to be really i was student of rembrandt not himself but his work mainly because it's very very technically pure his drawings look very simple but there isn't a line that isn't essential to the drawing he was very economical and very studious about every single he put down and it's not a bad thing when you're learning how to draw or something to copy somebody else's but copy somebody good and that's what i did a lot when i was learning to draw it was copy rembrandt drawings line for lin and really studying shape eating technique  see a little bit of everything paper craft paintings colored pencil drawings japonica of those actually the next question i was going to ask was you know besides the paper  and the stuff you mentioned on acrylic what is some of the stuff that you like to do the most as far as art one of the most fun thing we see things we do are these anime and manga conventions where we saw a lot of our work i really like in one of the things they always like doing in japan is poking of mountainous most people think of japan as really crowded but i would say ninety eight percent of japan is just empty mountains they can't really do anything with because they're so steep and  so the population of japan is concentrated on ever plateaus or on the coast but that's one of the things i started doing years ago this is digitally going up and finding these paintings and i have to have the kind of memory where it can take a snapshot of something and then go back and render it digitally on a computer or dr and that was oh a lot of that was fugitive colors i would say they were to painting is destroyed by now when i saw it three years ago or so it's it is fifteen percent that left so because we study just not i mean they weren't wealthy good it's just the way the they do things in japan so either they own this mountain because they've been in the area for three four hundred years and they came across these ruins on  the sea of japan it was obviously something a bill that it was this two hundred foot stone wall facing the ocean huge bits huge boulders so when we got back to the house  which you know they weren't real proud of but when you know the japanese car he came around in one nine hundred forty five and said we're going to put the you know on your mountain it was like yeah great it is really you know go  but that is it is it interesting aspect of japan and they can do it there because you can leave the house empty in the country for thirty years and you know get destroyed it will just be empty and  leading other people's things alone and in general which is sort of how the culture evolved yeah i mean a lot of people tend to think of them as being really really honest you could literally put your wallet down the side work in tokyo are killed oh stuff with care shit and expected to be there week later room and it's not that people are really honest you know they are but they are more like they really are very loath to insert themselves into someone else's situation i don't know why or they think the way we do art which is in america more me me me it's my work my work my idea they review that is very egocentric the  but no real original art that somebody two hundred years ago did and you're just kind of redoing in a new material or could that be why manga sure is a lot of elements with some of this really old artwork do you think well of the story certainly or very  nose at them wrong they could literally take your head off but because the samurai had so much power they understood they had they had and life and death over over most everybody th came across and so they made it a point to have the highest code of manners in dealing with people because they could have such control over the life and death now with with a country of rules where they follow the rules and everybody just follows the rules not because it's the right thing to do or it's just it makes life easier for everybody if everybody follows the rules and one of things that really like about that the country which is not really bad or that it isn't it isn't small it's all got you know a connection with each other because you can't really have one without the other in a way you know so a lot of what i do is kind of cent but taking in a taken to a really extraordinary different level and it's one of the reasons i think they do so well there is this one you teach we work with schools alone we do a lot of teaching with we do a lot of classes in pretty much everything we do including japanese  language we do a lot of places on line for japanese we just did a week with the local school for instance making close to three thousand origami cranes for the peace exhibit  things here like in pennsylvania is lot of home school groups that can get there or curriculum credit by coming to us or coming here and doing your workshop for you know maybe something that you muse to yourself about our view yourself as an artist in a quiet moment where you know your thoughts just start winding their way in a particular way well it's always the next the next the next project which if you're lucky for me anyhow i keep having ideas about the next project i'm doing i've just be going to be doing another trip to japan in the floor for six weeks or so and i've just begun to put that together with what i'm going to be doing one of the things they do when i do these trips is post for schools and other people five or ten minutes what i've done that day so the schools and other people can follow it and take a virtual tour of japan which i started doing on my last trip and it that it has it's quite a following and it's fun to do so i mean that's sickest the thing with this is just keep finding the next the next stone to turn over