Top 277 Quotes & Sayings by Kehinde Wiley - Page 2

I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.

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

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

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

I've fished everywhere I've traveled.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country.

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start in a place that's radically intimate and particular.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

Women are expected to identify gender as a starting point. Ethnicities are expected to identify that as a location. Is it ever possible for the artist to imagine a state of absolute freedom? That was my call to arms.

All art is self-portraiture.

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

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

That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.

This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.