Acceptance, tolerance, bravery, compassion. These are the things my mom taught me

Art was in my blood and my soul, and my grandfather and whole family were encouraging influences. The more I learned, the more I wanted to study and produce art. Picasso was one of my favorite studies.

It came from what I saw as a kid, all those gestures of my mother. [...] That’s why the film is so precise.

The mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their 'place.' The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that 'all men are brothers,' trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male. They who so gravely taught me to split my body from my mind and both from my 'soul,' taught me also to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition.

It's a dream to make a documentary about the story of my mother and our family. It's a way of paying tribute and also taking control of my life. I'm the one who knows what I went through to be here, what I built. As an artist, I want to tell relevant stories that contribute to making the world a better place than it is.

My mother's kiss made me a painter.

We couldn’t afford many things, but we had education. My father was a headmaster and later became an education officer. My mother was fantastic: she always told me, ‘Do what you want.’ She gave me total freedom, in fact both my parents did. But I really owe it to my mother. When I said I will go to Banaras (Varanasi) to study, she said, ‘You want to go to Banaras? Ok, go.’ She would say, ‘Don’t worry about money, reading is most important, read and then everything will come.’ My family was very open. Thanks to them I’m what I am today. I am the only child of my parents, so is my wife.

They very often would let me paint, you know, instead of doing some of the other lessons, because I didn't speak English well enough. So I had a lot of painting. And I brought the paintings home with great pride, and my mother kept them for years, so I do know that I sort of…That was a place that I actually remember the smell of those materials and the texture of the surfaces and just, you know, kind of having this real visceral love of moving that color around -- which is, I think, you know, I still have that…

We are (particularly on my maternal side) heavily influenced by black history, culture, music, literature and art; these things have always been of value to us so performance came really easily to me