In his own words, he is attracted to spaces “usually built on unstable terrain, where stuff either gets dumped or blown in by the wind,” or “things that don’t spend much time in the sun.” Though his paintings refer to specific places and encounters, Fukunaga builds his compositions from sketches and memory, which sometimes blur together. More recently, his works have explored variations on a limited range of objects—after discerning a certain anthropomorphic quality in mops, for example, Fukunaga began a series of mop portraits. He is also known to paint his studio subjects in the dark with a strong backlight.