Ashlee Simpson

I'm an artist, and I go in the studio and make my music. And then I'll give it to my dad and he does what he does. And he does, you know, the press, and figuring out shows and whatnot. When it comes to my artistic freedom, he doesn't, like, step on my toes or anything.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.