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

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.

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.

There was no image of the other biological half of myself. And as an artists, as a - as an - as a portraitist, the look of who you are was radically important to me.

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.

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.

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