Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.

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 was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

All art is self-portraiture.

I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.