The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.

What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world.

He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.

Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.