Amy Sherald

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

I paint paintings of people.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

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.

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

My mother was willing to support art as a summer program for me. She never supported it as a career decision until I won the National Gallery Portrait Competition.

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.

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.

I'm not a very verbal person.

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

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

To be human is to be visible.

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.

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

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.

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.

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.

It's hard for me to find people to paint. There has got to be something about them that only I can see.

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

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