I said to myself, "If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one."

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

I said to myself, "If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one."

At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas."

It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.

Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.

A key text for me is James Baldwin's essays. And, in particular, his essay Stranger in the Village. It's a text that I've used in a lot of paintings. The essay is from the mid-'50s, when he's moved to Switzerland to work on a novel, and he finds himself the only black man living in a tiny Swiss village. He even says, "They don't believe I'm American - black people come from Africa." The essay is not only about race relations, but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.