Top 66 Kehinde Wiley Quotes

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies?

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.

I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

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.

My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.

It’s so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

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.

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.

I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!

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.

Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.

I thought I’d be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.

In America , there’s a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.

The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.

The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.

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.

I think there’s something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren’t necessarily institutionally recognized.

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.

Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what’s possible.

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

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.

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.

I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.

If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.

I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total ‘Oprah’ story.

What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.

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.

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.

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.

Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.

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.

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.

Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.

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.

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.

I’ve fished everywhere I’ve traveled.

You don’t hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.

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.

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.

Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.

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.

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the ’80s, back when it just wasn’t a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.

Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.

I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.

One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.