Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Very early on, when I was in my twenties, Steve Jobs convinced me to quit college. He talked to me after I had spent about a year in Michigan studying the history of art.
I think that if someone told me I could have been a visual artist, I might have been a visual artist instead. And if I'd known I could have done art history, I would have done that. But I just didn't know.
I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.
I was at Edinburgh doing history of art, Spanish and Arabic. I was originally supposed to do Italian instead of Arabic but when I went to see one of the lecturers they told me I should really do something more curveball. So I did.
The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
It dawned on me that comics were not an intrinsically limited medium. There was a tremendous amount of things you could do in comics that you couldn't do in other art forms - but no one was doing it. I figured if I'd make a try at it, I'd at least be a footnote in history.