Who's your favorite surrealist painter? "I guess Magritte."

Is Magritte at all arousing to you? "No, it's just the colors, and the clean lines of his work. Not necessarily sensual like Dali, but calming to look at, and kind of fucked up, too."

The cliché is that men are more visually stimulated than women--do you find this to be true? "It's definitely a cliché. I could go into a whole feminism thing here. Men are just more vocal about it. It's only just becoming okay for women to do the same."

Do you speak from theory or personal experience?

"Both."

Talk to me more about this personal experience. "About the sensuality?"

About the relationship in your life between the visual and the arousing. "The visual and the arousing...."

Or, more succinctly, what turns you on. "Whatever I'm looking at, painting or theater or film, it's honesty that is arousing. Somebody who is willing not to do things within the box that people have for them."

Honesty isn't a very visual quality. "Oh, I think it can be."

How so? "I guess it's honesty with yourself--whether it makes sense to other people doesn't matter."

I still don't see that as visual--honesty is more a matter of character, of actions and choices. "Maybe I don't really mean 'honesty'--like, Frida Kahlo. The things that she painted were totally disturbing and really honest--from her bushy eyebrows to that horrible accident she had, depicting herself with things coming out of her body--so she painted things how she saw them; not the prettiness of it, what we think is typically beautiful about life or a woman, but what she saw. That's the honesty I'm talking about. Just baring herself, raw."

And it gets you hot. "It gets me hot, yeah. Now I'm thinking Frida's my favorite. Scratch Magritte. Sheesh. Frida Kahlo all the way."