This painting, Self Portrait 1982, which is also known as Self Portrait with Suzanne is a literal representation, not of black culture, but of specifically Basquiat himself. The image shows two figures, one male (Basquiat) and the other female, as represented by the clear but stylised breasts that are visible despite her long, orange dress. This was Basquiat's girlfriend at the time, Suzanne, and obviously this is from where the secondary title comes.

In the image, Basquiat and Suzanne are talking, as evidenced by the radiating lines that seem to spray from their mouths. Meanwhile, surrounding the figures, on all sides and underneath them are strings of letters and words. Behind Basquiat's head and encapsulated in a squared speech bubble are what appear to be words – they are apparently gibberish, and yet there is a pattern there once the viewer has studied them for long enough. A similar speech bubble, also squared, but narrowed to fit between the two figures, emanates from Suzanne's mouth.

Two meanings can be drawn from this:

Firstly, that Basquiat and Suzanne talk so much that they fill every moment with their ideas and that together, the world is vibrant, full of colour and complete. The second is that despite Suzanne and Basquiat trying to have meaningful conversations they are so surrounded with the same repetitive small talk – for example, the word 'Orange' is repeated several times in a smaller speech box, somewhere on a level with Suzanne's knees, which could be a reference to the so-called 'celeb culture' more prevalent today, when a celebrity choosing a certain brand can cause stocks of garments to run out in mere hours or a reference to how people, for example, at art exhibitions, will all say the same meaningless trite things over and over.

The figures are independent of each other, and yet are clearly intimate with one another, the Basquiat-figure's hand stretches towards the Suzanne-figure's middle, while she is open to this approach. The colours used in the painting (actually a drawing in pen and pencil on paper) too demonstrate this sense of a world shared by the two of them: the deep orange of the dress is picked up in the horizontal stripes of his shirt along with red and yellow, and the letters and words tend to use these colours too. Depth is added with vigorous strokes of black which delineate the figures, the speech boxes and some of the letters.