Service is the key to everything in life.
My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.
There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good.
Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.
A key text for me is James Baldwin's essays. And, in particular, his essay Stranger in the Village. It's a text that I've used in a lot of paintings. The essay is from the mid-'50s, when he's moved to Switzerland to work on a novel, and he finds himself the only black man living in a tiny Swiss village. He even says, "They don't believe I'm American - black people come from Africa. " The essay is not only about race relations, but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.
My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead. " The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.
At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.
Inclusion and fairness in the workplace. . . is not simply the right thing to do; it's the smart thing to do.
I wish I had fair justification for not being as informed as I should be, but I don't.
Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature, as if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits.
Some people never change their mind through their whole lives, about anything, despite new information that comes in. And now that we know that homosexuality is not a choice, it's biological, I think we have to love and understand them.