Several years ago, I took up a relationship with Stephen Crane's poetry – what Deborah Frizzell, in her October 2003 NYArts article about my work, calls "ventriloquizing his lines in word-image conjunctions". I liked Crane's black-and- white take on war, so sarcastic and haunting – “these men were born to drill and die…” – and the way he lullabies a warning, like “Do not weep maiden, war is kind…”

I coupled Crane's words with my inability to turn off NPR in the studio. Even when the static made the words incomprehensible, I could tell by the calmness of the speaker's voice that nothing bad had happened – New York was still there. I transformed that static into a visual form on my canvases by covering the words of Crane's anti-war poems with thick oil paint. Because I'd written those words in tar, they had a way of creeping back through to the surface. It was a good fight, but I won. Those paintings were shown in 2003 at Kristen Frederickson Contemporary Art; I liked the way people were looking at them and reading them even though they couldn't really make out the words.

Last year, I worked in Rome during a month-long residency, and let myself be a tourist enough to notice all of the graffiti – inescapable, and so different from that in New York, where who cares if there's writing on the construction site walls. This was Rome though, parlor room to the world.

I showed the photos of my trip to Passion, an inmate at the prison where I teach in the college program. I was amazed when she started reading the graffiti on the walls in the pictures saying, “Hey, I didn't know that the Bloods were in Italy”. It was then that I understood why the state refuses to let the prisoners' artwork be exhibited: they're worried that gang messages will be hidden in the images. Aw, art can be dangerous. That's a great thought. I like that.

But I'm not a street writer, not in a gang, so I  take my messages from Crane's cues. My big canvases become walls and I take a piece of them like a writer and I say, Hey (this many years later), “We Patriots Slave”, and it's not a tag but a bold loud comment. And I write “War Night' because that's how in the dark this all feels.

And I have to make symbols, too, write with pictures. That's when I came up with the backpack. Back at prison, all the inmates carry these clear plastic backpacks so that everyone can see what's inside. Don't you think it's coming to that on the outside, too? So I run with the image of the backpack – once so innocuous, so first-day-of-school innocent, but now a tank made of canvas. And later at the new MoMA, from the second floor I look down into the coat check room and it's stacked with backpacks, like a Mike Kelly installation. There's the beauty, there's the danger: in the familiar. And in my paintings, there's a bright red line. Passion's line, I think, the one that ties the decoding of the language of the gangs to the bulletin board this flat earth has become.

Flat. Like a big stretched canvas.