Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I try to make work about things that matter.
Comics also led a lot of young people to science fiction.
Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time.
One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person.
The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act.
There are fewer representations of black figures in the historical record.
Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.
The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.
I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.
You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.
My dream was always to be in museums. It's a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions.
What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.
I see myself as having fulfilled a lot of my ambition. All the things I dreamed of achieving, I've achieved for the most part.
Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.
No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.
Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.
There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.
I see life and the world simply as an arena for competition. That's just what people do, and there are always going to be winners and losers.
I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.
I think the only value of being in school is that everything you do should be a problem that needs to be solved. Everything should be a challenge.
My ambition was never to make a lot of money. It wasn't to travel around the world. I was really just struggling to make the best pictures I could make.
You don't see black people winning Nobel prizes for physics or economics or any of the industries or institutions that shape the way the world operates.
If you ever find yourself on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you look around in every direction and don't see anything. That's a terrifying experience.
If I go to the museum and see white bodies, black bodies, Asian bodies, Latino bodies, then I will expect to see those things every time I go. That matters a lot.
I don't want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I'm really interested in.
I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands.
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.
You can't be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility.
Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.
When State Way Gardens and The Robert Taylor Homes were being torn down, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to use that as a backdrop for the development of a super hero narrative.
The National Gallery is the place that means to represent everything that's good and important in art and show what it believes everyone who is a citizen should recognize and engage.
At a certain point, you have to decide whether you'd be satisfied always acknowledging the beauty and the greatness of what other people create or if you want to be in the same arena.
When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent.
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.
I really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.
Clarity is important. Part of what I'm trying to do with some of these pictures is eliminate as much of the potential, as many kind of readings as people might want to make, as possible.
Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.
The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.
People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.
My first black-on-black picture was 'The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.' I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony - all of that.
I gave up on the idea of making art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what art is returned as a critical issue.
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.
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.
It's forcing the issue of perception by rendering an image that is just at the edge of perception, which in someway forces you to look more closely and for you to adjust your vision so you can see in the dark.
Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the museum were perfectly satisfied with the narrative they were constructing.
Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised.
What I hope 'Mastry' ends up doing is completely undermining or doing away with the notion that artists are a savant: that they do things that can't be articulated, driven by inner turmoil they don't have access to.
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
I want to create music that you can just vibe to. Put in your car and just you know like you roll all the windows up and you're like dancing and you just don't know why you're dancing but the music just makes you move.