Amy Sherald

I am relieved that I can pay back my school loans.

I'm not a very verbal person.

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.

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.

I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create.

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

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.

I probably shouldn't curse as much as I do.

When I'm painting and in the zone, it's difficult for me to stop. It can take me half a day to get into that space, and once I do, I only talk to a certain few people who won't disrupt it. Home to sleep and back at it, nothing else outside of getting food. Everything else is an annoyance getting in my way.

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.

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.

My brother dying changed me. I didn't realize how strong I was until I lost my brother.

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.

I wanted to be in museums. I don't do things to be small.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

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.

A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn't find out about until after graduate school.

When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.

I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

Signing autographs is weird. I'm an introvert, so it's been a strain in that way.

Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world.

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.