So sometimes you have to play your hand and sort of push in a direction. And I think that masculinity is the driving point for a lot of the way that people, like, posture in the work.

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.

In the Studio Museum in Harlem, when I was dealing with that community and dealing with my peers in the streets, it allowed for me to get outside of Yale, to get outside of art-speak, and to really think about art as a material practice that has very useful and pragmatic material precedent.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This is New York City. No one's going to follow you back to your studio.

In some way they are all self-portraits, but I think I know what you mean by asking this - I would say, it is too idealistic to paint yourself.

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.