Ridley Howard interviews painter Jim Lee on the occasion of the exhibition Jim Lee: Please Be Clean When You Do It at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, on view through March 31, 2013.

Lee comments: "I need to work and not really know that I am making anything in particular. I guess that’s why I work on multiple pieces at the same time. It allows me to keep moving without focusing so much on the act of painting – in the end, I just want to make things. There shouldn’t be any hierarchy in my process. Oil paint is no more important than latex, and linen is no more important than a piece of plywood. When I paint in this manner, the pieces become more interesting to me…I lose track of what is actually occurring."