A Quote by Kehinde Wiley

I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process. — © Kehinde Wiley
I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.
The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures - particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.
Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.
Each painting is its own world, but a lot of times I do see the paintings as one page from a story. You can imagine what has happened before or after. Sometimes they are worded as being a part of a story, especially the paintings where characters are in conversation.
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.
If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different - a different attitude or brushstroke. 'Hamlet' is like an entire gallery of old masters.
I think there has to be an interesting transformative process between your perception of reality and making the paintings. If you are just trying to render what you see you are not entering into a transformative process. And that's what makes a good painting: the process of transforming and the willingness to leave reality behind.
Organizing is an educational process. The best educational process in the union is the picket line and the boycott. You learn about life.
Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.
I think about my art works as paintings, because they refer to the history of painting. I also have to think about them as sculptures, because every part of the process is part of the project. They're sculptures because they play on the idea of what should be hanging in a gallery. In that sense they're also kind of ready-mades.
I think that people tend to look at the paintings as being resolved or finite. But, to me, a painting can be an index for all of the paintings I've done and all of the paintings I'm going to do. It's like if I'm doing a film of the Olympics, I'm not examining a specific sport; I'm interested in the overall context.
I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.
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