QUOTES by Kehinde Wiley
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley