In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.

I still make paintings and use the figure; it's hard to do and hard to succeed. On some levels, because I am working with black figures and black pigment, it's even harder because I have to be more responsible for the image. I try to be really careful about the presence the figure projects.

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.

Sometimes when I can't communicate that I'm frustrated, I'll just grab my guitar and I can play out that emotion and be able to cope with whatever is going on. So even being able to, like I said, share this gift with so many other people, it's definitely very therapeutic. It helps me just to focus and to be able to kind of get out those emotions that I'm having without reacting in such a way that's not acceptable in society.

Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.

I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power.

I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together; they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.