UV: Who or what are your biggest influences?
RP: As a child: under the piano listening to my mother play Tchaikovsky and Ellington; seeing abstract expressionists at the Richmond Art Center; my grandmother and her garden work; my father and his geometry; Gaugin and Van Gogh portraits.

UV: What kind of music do you like?
RP: Could be from anywhere -- most often it's reggae, calypso, or Bob Dylan.

UV: Is your art, your life as an artist, compulsory?
RP: Yes.

UV: What were you thinking when you took the photo on the cover?
RP: Mainly about proximity and hoping to have steady hands. I was in awe of faces, atmosphere, form, color, sounds of the Trinidad Carnival.

UV: Why do you take photographs?
RP: To convey the "natural mystic."