When you grow up looking at Superman, Batman, and all those superheroes, you take it for granted that is what superheroes are supposed to be. So then, when I see art books at the library, and I'm seeing Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, I think that's what artists look like.
My dream was always to be in museums. It's a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions.
I used to always say - and I think a lot of artists think of it this way - that when you see a black figure, the way the critical establishment operated, you can only imagine that figure having a sociological value. They never say the ways in which their aesthetics were equally worthy of consideration.
The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act.
Every step on my way to becoming an artist seemed preordained. The right people were always in the right places at the right times to boost me to the next level. I was fortunate to be selected for a summer drawing class offered to teens at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County.
Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important.
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.
Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.
To me, if there is any sort of value added to the accumulation of knowledge over time, then the work of artists should be a reflection of that accumulated value, accumulated knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have the sophistication to put that into play in the work you're making.
I stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book 'Great Negroes, Past and Present' in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. I was in the fifth grade.
There's this idea that many of the attitudes and personality developments in black folks in the diaspora are a consequence of this unresolved trauma. There have been attempts by black artists to try and figure out how to represent that in some kind of way.
