My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

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

The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.

The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation.

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.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.

The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.

I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work.

It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.

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.

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.

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.

I've fished everywhere I've traveled.

Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.

Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.

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.

If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.

I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

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

During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.

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

Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.

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.

The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.

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.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!

Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.

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

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

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.

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 think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.

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.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.

I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.

There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.

I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.

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.

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.

This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.

I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.

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.

By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.

I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.