1/ Your art has stayed in the shadow for years. How do you explain the huge success of the Disasterware and Porcelain War Museum series?

Most famous artists are linked to an art movement. I am identified with "Pop Surrealism." It is also called "low brow" art, but some of the pioneer "low brow" artists in America didn't like that name so they insisted that the first book about this genre be titled "Pop Surrealism." I was a painter, but I did not get any international attention until I started painting natural and socio-political catastrophes on plates and making porcelain weapons. My first European exhibition was at The Republic of Slovenia Ministry of Defense headquarters in Ljubljana. Unless you had a security pass you could not enter and see it. But this exhibition got a good review in a Slovenian army magazine and because that army is more avant-garde than God I became known outside Seattle.

2/ How came the idea to use Delft porcelain and picture great human disasters on it?

Pictures on Limoges or Quimper china are usually nice pictures of royalty or peasants doing things royalty or peasants did in the 18th and l9th centuries. I wanted to update these pictures by depicting the world we inhabit in the 21st century. It is a world full of violence and tumult. I chose the Delft tradition to do this in because I had a friend who called himself "Von Dutch" and I wanted to make something in the Dutch style for Von Dutch. Europeans think Von Dutch is only a brand of American clothing. They should know there was an actual person named "Von Dutch" who didn't make clothes. He made cars, motorcycles, guns and knives. He was an artist from California whose real name was Kenneth Howard.

3/ Your art provokes many questions about our relation to the darkest hours of humanity. Please tell us more about that. Does it ask us if we can face the world's truth and hang it in our kitchen? ??

Yes. The zeitgeist is very dark these days. You see it in the iconography of urban graffiti and in the fashions of the punks and Gothic subcultures. You can hear it in the music and watch it on TV and in movies. I am from the generation of '68. But I was not radical. I was "Flower Power." I didn't listen to Rammstein in those days I listened to Malicorne. The only people who dressed in black were Marxists or nuns and priests. Now you go to a club and everyone there looks like a demon that has escaped from the 5th ring of Hell.

4/ Could we see those pieces as an objection about mass media manipulation? a critique about the hypocrisy of a mankind who wants to remember the best part of things and set apart the other? ??

If I announced that my art was not a critique of political and cultural hypocrisy I could be charged with a hate crime in France under the Gayssot law, or some other draconian anti-racist law there. In Germany it's forbidden to display a swastika so it's best to not say too much, other than I was born with a perverse sense of humor that was a gift of my mother.

5/ The origins of those series are to be found in a trip you made through Slovenia in 95 and your encounter with NSK, an activist art group. What made you fly to Slovenia and what have you learned from this trip? ??

I went to Sarajevo during the war in Yugoslavia with the rock band Laibach that is a component of the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) collective. I was an apolitical aging American hippy. I didn't know where Slovenia was or anything about that country. An NGO named CEC Artslink: International Partners sent me to Ljubljana on a residency program. Somehow I ended up in bombed out Sarajevo and that experience changed my art and my naive belief in the basic goodness of mankind. Since then NSK has become more metaphysical (Suprematist) while I have become more cynical and suspicious. Especially of America n style democracy.

6/ For creating the weapons mold, you had to go to the black market in Slovenia and buy some. How was this experience?

A Slovenian friend loaned me his own antique WWII machine gun. I took it to a man who restores church ornaments and he made a beautiful mold like I had never seen before. It was a work of art itself. I needed more guns so my friend went to some Albanians and got me two Beretta pistols. These were too small to turn into porcelain because porcelain shrinks 20% in the kiln so I sent them back. My friend said, "The Albanians are in the gun business, they are not in the art business. If you want bigger guns you must buy them." I had no money to buy real guns so I went to Venice and bought toy guns. These looked just like real ones but were much cheaper and legal. And if you accidentally ruin a toy gun no Albanians will come and break your legs.

7/ You have learned the Delft painting technique in a lady's club. As the only man (and true artist), didn't you feel a bit lonely there? ??

Not at all. I felt loved. The ladies treated me like their eccentric son. They even brought me sandwiches. I made nice pictures with them, no disasters. One lady was from Dresden. I didn't want to upset her so I painted cows instead of bombers. My other Delft teacher is the current president of the Hells Angels MC Amsterdam. He worked in a Delft factory in Gouda before he became a Hells Angel.

8/ Totalitarism and Terror are very important themes in your work. How do you see world's history? And world's state in 2008?

Someone told me that George Orwell's book "l984" was originally going to be titled l948. They said his publishers wanted to put the story in the future because it would have been too controversial to call it 1948 so soon after the war. By the time he died Orwell believed communism and fascism were mid-century dead ends, no longer capable of capturing the imagination. He believed in the triumph of a more shocking totalitarianism based on the humanistic pretensions of socialism. I'm with Orwell on this. Just look at all the surveillance technology everywhere.

9/ Did you ever have strong negative feedbacks about you art?

One well-known New York critic wrote that my art was "predictable." This comment was far more devastating to me than anything ever written about its perceived political incorrectness. Some people who knew me when I was an uber-hippy don't get the Nazi tropes I'm using now and have assumed the worst. They will be the first ones I shoot when I take over the world.

10/ Thanks, Charles. Any final words you'd like to say?

"Libertie, Fraternitie, Equalite et Bernard Buffet!"