The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to the ways in which young people look at resistance culture as a pattern that should be mimicked and admired.

There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.

There's quite obviously the desire to open the rule sets that allow for inclusion or disclusion. I think that my hope would be that my work set up certain type of precedent, that allowed for great institutions, museums and viewers to see the possibilities of painting culture to be a bit more inclusive.

I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.

I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.

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.

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