Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

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

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to preform a particular function.

Part of the history of black people in the western hemisphere, in some ways, has been fleeing from this notion that they were black. So I can represent an ideal, and with that, you can demonstrate that there is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to run from, and that, in fact, a good deal of beauty that resides there.

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 want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.