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" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "

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" My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys. "

Black And White

" My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north. "

" Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies? "

" In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination. "

" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "

" Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. "

" One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up. "

" Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art. "

" I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department. "

" There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting. "

" In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle. "

" Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography. "

" When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy. "

" The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time. "

" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "

" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "

" In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. "

" I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do. "

" I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial. "

" For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing. "

" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "

" When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers. "

" So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement. "

" What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe. "

" In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. "

" Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. "

" As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook. "

" My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic. "

" I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there. "

" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "