In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

There is no pedestrian culture [in South Central Los Angeles].

I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.

When I look back at my paintings, they don't give me a sense of where I was when I first met that guy. They don't give me a sense of what I felt like when I first saw that original source material. They give me a sense of the world that I'm trying to create. And we all just have to deal with that.

I try to create a place of disorientation.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.