My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

In our conversations, he [Michael Jackson] revealed a surprising understanding of art history. We were going through the finer points of the difference between one Italian sculptor to the next. You know, this - these are things that we don't necessarily assume of people in sanctified light.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

There's always a tug of war. Like, in the States, in America, there's certainly a higher quotient, I would imagine, of, like, macho, like, masculinity posturing.

That's what I think my job in the world has been, is to sort of try to sit silently a bit and watch it all sort of move and see those small, quiet details, whether it be a small village outside of Colombo [country?] or the favelas of Brazil, where, again, resistance culture is something that you hear resonating in the streets of South Central Los Angeles as well.