What I remember most of my child-hood is drawing.

My clearest recollection is of myself drawing my idol, my icon, Muhammad Ali.I am sitting on the living-room floor surrounded by cut-up breakfast-cereal boxes for paper to draw on.

I did not know then as I know now, that I was depicting my characters in the style as the Egyptians on their tomb walls.The profiles of my characters were drawn in that distinctive and majestically graceful profile facing to the right or to the left.

Colours became very important from very early on due to my father's influence. My father loved music and dancing, and urged me to feel and express myself in the same way.

My mother and her best-friend designed and made clothes for both of them and I would watch them draw patterns and handle different fabrics with colour and textures, as they talked about they worked. I was brought up to consider both of them my mother.

They were close and considered each other as sisters.They enjoyed a loving kinship that was also creative.

This is the legacy and culture I am proud of.

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Painting is expression, a way of me talking with everybody else about how I feel, like a blues-man would play his blues. The whole thing is about feeling. Painting is blues. I paint those feelings that are from inside my head, from inside my soul. The spiritual part of all this is the heritage, the thing that comes from ancestors, the ingredients that everybody talks about when they talk about the past, where we all come from, which is DNA, the genes.

What I’m doing is recording the memory that comes to me from nature, along with the music that came from West Africa and the Atlantic experience, all of it, and what I do then is give it form, give it some skin, textures and colors, the whole thing is like an umbilical cord that has not lost its life force, it’s the whole nine yards.