Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.

I really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job!

People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.