At the time when Colin Powell made the case at the U.N. for the invasion of Iraq, I had been thinking about making a series of paintings that would compare the desire of conquest in the field of love to the one that often leads to war…. “I was also thinking about the egotism that often fuels the impulse to make political art. Picasso used Guernica not just to make a political statement, but also to strategically further his career and notoriety. My paintings acknowledge the impossibility of ever fully defining a person in an image. Portraiture reveals as much about the sitter as it exposes the authors fantasies and judgments.