If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.

Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This weed we call self-actualization….It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.”

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be”

"If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush."

"I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts."

"Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!"

"No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder."

"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."

"Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic."