Gentlemen, let's go row!
Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them; but I don't think that's crucial.
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.
My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.
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.
Unfortunately, gambling and winning don't often go hand-in-hand.
I explored rock culture and what the guitar can do though people like Jimmy Page and John McLaughlin, and the music moves away from pop.
Private Joker is silly and he's ignorant but he's got guts and guts is enough.
My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.