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I think there's something basically wrong with the general public that they do need their icons.

There's always a sense of tragedy with icons. It happened to both the Princess of Wales and Diana Dors. A lot of people had grown up with them, and everybody loved them. Then, when they had at last found happiness, they were taken in the most dreadful way.

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.

My beauty icons are women whose images are self-created.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

I appear to be drawn to iconic characters and what they reflect back to our cultures.

You know, face painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of one representing the community, it's not unique at all.

No matter what your cultural sophistication or what language you speak, everyone can understand images.

I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.

People of color have a constant frustration of not being represented, or being misrepresented, and these images go around the world.