My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.

Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art.

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.

Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.

I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook.

The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.

There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting.

Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.

In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.

If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.

In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination.

Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.

Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.

I've fished everywhere I've traveled.

In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be.

I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there.