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. Amy Sherald Read Quote
Signing autographs is weird. I’m an introvert, so it’s been a strain in that way. Amy Sherald Read Quote
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. Amy Sherald Read Quote
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. Amy Sherald Read Quote
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. Amy Sherald Read Quote
Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic – an archetype. Amy Sherald Read Quote
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. Amy Sherald Read Quote
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. Amy Sherald Read Quote
