Dan Colen

Love is important. I didn't have the energy to be giving it to somebody else in a way that they deserved, and I knew that. So I've always been scared to go too far with somebody I care for because I knew there would come a day when I'd need to pick up and finish a painting for the next three months. That day is inevitable.

It's such a paradox. You come from this place where you want fame; you don't want to be bourgeois, but you want to be successful. You want to be accepted, but you also want to be going against the grain. You want to be on the outside, but you want to be on the inside.

We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation.

The importance of heart health became very real for me when my father died of heart disease seven years ago. Having experienced the loss first hand, I am inspired to do everything I can to break the cycle and prevent families from losing loved ones to this preventable disease.

I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.