When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.
Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world.
I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create.
I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.
To be human is to be visible.
Success, for me, is staying true to who you are and not deviating off a path.
When I found photography, I found this other kind of portraiture of black families and black people who were photographing themselves or having themselves photographed in ways they wanted to be seen.
When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.
In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.
Art was not a thing for my family and is still not a thing for my family. My family will not go to a museum unless I say we have to go there. That's why I really feel like it was something I was supposed to do because there was no directive that pushed me in that direction.
Why can't I make up my own characters and paint the people I want to see in the world? I'm depicting the many people who existed in history but whose presence was never documented.
Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.
I was at all-white schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I wanted to feel what it was like just to be me and not, like, Black Amy.
Becoming an artist is not empirical; it's not about hard work. You have to put the work in, but that doesn't mean you're going to make it.
My approach to portraiture is conceptual.
The people I choose as models have a quality that seems to contain the past, the present, and the future all at once. It's hard to explain. I can look at 100 people in a room but only find it in one person.
Michelle Obama is extraordinary, but she is also the kind of woman that exists in a way that is - she's a hundred percent relatable to all kinds of people, all genders all around the world.
It's hard for me to find people to paint. There has got to be something about them that only I can see.
I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.
