Reaching people through media

(Music playing.) I remember when I wrote my first solo book, this one here, back in 2000. A good friend of mine, she said to me, she says, "You are crazy. You have given away all your secrets." I said, "They are not really secrets. "They are just little things I have developed, and the way I see it, it's not "like I am giving things away. "It's not like I am expecting everybody to go out there and become a photo realist. "What I am doing is inspiring, to stimulate people to get creative, and that, to me, is a tremendous joy." The reward for a lot of this stuff, writing books, like for instance my latest book, and I write for a lot of foreign magazines, like this one here that comes out of Poland, here's a little article on how I did the little Corona bottles in Times Square. In Photoshop User, I have a column in every issue. That's right here. It's called From Bert's Studio, where I am talking about the Iron Man from Times Square. I have a column in Layers Magazine for every issue, which is called Artistic Expressions, where it says I am talking about the creation of 3D letters in the Toys 'R' Us sign in Times Square. The painting isn't tremendous, but the rewards are tremendous. And the rewards are that I get all these e-mails from people who write and say, 'Look what I did from what I learned from you,' and that was the reward: to know that I am reaching all these people. And for me, it's kind of like a payback because I came from a poor background, and very little stimulation, and there were some people who saw my talent and said "We are going to help you. We are going to show you," like that nun in my Eighth Grade who told me to go High School of Art and Design. That was an inspiration. Without her, who knows where I would be today? So these people inspired me. So that's my motivation for doing all this stuff is to inspire other people. When I write a book and showing all the stuff that I did, it's not really a giving-away-my-secrets. What it is is this is what I did with that particular tool. Now here is how it works. You do something. And that, to me, is a tremendous reward of reaching to the public, whether it's through DVDs, or TV shows, or books, magazines, whatever it is. It's reaching that whole public and making them feel like they can do something, giving them that power to go over there and get creative.