Painting Quotes
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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
So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.
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
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
The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.
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 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
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
I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.
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
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 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
I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer - my version of him - that's in his collection.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley
The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.
Quote by -Kehinde Wiley