A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.

Whereas I remember being in Dakar, in Senegal, where I have my third studio, and street casting, and I remember looking at the faces of the young men that we were speaking to through translators and so on, showing them the books. Complete - completely different response.

[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born.

I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.

I think that once you're able to sort of get in line with who and how you relate to the world, you'll become closer to this index that I'm referring to. Because what you want is this card that relates to that book. What you want is this human that relates to this world, rather than having this art school society scattering that point of view somewhere in between. It becomes diffused. And that level of clarity, I think, was gained at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.

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