I think artists should define themselves. They should speak about their work and how it relates to society and what's going on in the world.

My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.

As a young kid I was in love with breakdancing. I practiced the uprock style, which is a battle style of dance that looks like fighting. It comes from the gangs in New York in the 1960s and '70s. It's beautiful, almost like a martial art, and it can be funny, too, because you make fun of each other.

People have thought that some of my writing and lines are done by a machine. I'm able to move in a way that's part gestural dance performance, and it's fun for me, so I incorporate that into the painting.

One teacher told me that my work belonged in the trash. That day I ran out of the classroom and ended up in the library, where there happened to be a black and white photography exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's photographs of the streets of New York. The subject of his photos were exactly what I was painting about.

The walls around us bear witness to lives past and present.

When I was young I was constantly reading walls; I took in everything written on walls, from love messages to political messages. It was my hobby and became my art.