Kehinde Wiley Quotes
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What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in.
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The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
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I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
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A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.
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I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.
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I try to create a place of disorientation.
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I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.
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So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.
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Even the hubris or the desire to go out into the world and find patterns that reflect back to yourself is so Lacanian and, like, mirrored, so as to be ridiculous. But there are very fixed sets of expectations that the world has about this work.
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I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.
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I think that once you're able to sort of get in line with who and how you relate to the world, you'll become closer to this index that I'm referring to. Because what you want is this card that relates to that book. What you want is this human that relates to this world, rather than having this art school society scattering that point of view somewhere in between. It becomes diffused. And that level of clarity, I think, was gained at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
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What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.
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I noticed that the work of my non - I noticed that the work of my friends who were white and male, specifically, existed in a type of freedom that was not bound by certain political questions and assumptions and locations.
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My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio up in Harlem.
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I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
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Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
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At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.
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Most people say, "Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this."Another way of looking at these paintings is, these are the guys who said yes.
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While I can hire out the portrait, I don't, because it's just - that's where I shine. You know, that's my blood sport.
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Usually I bring very attractive women with me to excite interest. I mean, it's a type of, like, strangers-with-candy situation.
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People who - and I think that's been a huge education for me. I think it's a - it's a privilege to be able to meet such a broad cross-section of New York and increasingly the world, and to get a feel of how people respond to visual culture.
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I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
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What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.
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I pay my models to work with me, so there becomes this weird sort of economic bartering thing, which made me feel really sort of uncomfortable, almost as though you were buying into a situation - which, again, is another way of looking at those paintings. The body language in those paintings is a lot more stiff.
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Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.
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My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.
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You know, one of my - one of my best and, I think, most enlightening moments was when I was contacted by Michael Jackson. And he requested that I paint his portrait.
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I love being a portraitist.
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This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.
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I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.
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