You start like a white blanket and you have to preserve that, and each year that you live chips away at your essential value.

If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.

I think treating a model as nothing but a collection of tendons is done to lessen people's discomfort with the fact that they are looking at a naked person. They think it makes the audience and model more comfortable. But that was not the case when I modeled and I find that others agree. I feel that the sexual component is essential. I feel it is much more objectifying to be a table than a beautiful naked girl.

Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.

A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits.

I didn't want to be beholden to one person. So I did something where I had hundreds of people who backed the work. I could just do work, and since a lot of people were interested in it, I wasn't beholden to any particular one of them.

A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.