"I had a crisis of sorts when I realized there was too much of a gap between what I wanted to say and the means I had to say it with. To me this seemed similar to the crisis Philip Guston went through when he made the transition from abstraction to figuration in the seventies- in part, in response to the Vietnam War, feeling that the work he was doing wasn't an adequate response to the tumultuous world he found himself in. The crisis I faced prompted a move towards the direct quotations of text."
Glenn Ligon