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 grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.

That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.