After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.

He [Michael Jackson] would choose specific moments. They were art history books that I prefer. They were paintings that he prefers. It's this dance back and forth. We were halfway through the dance. He died.

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.

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.

Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility.