A Quote by Kehinde Wiley
I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
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I went to the Chicago Art Institute, which was the best painting school in the area at that time. And I took painting classes - basic elementary painting classes and drawing classes of all sorts.
The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you'd have a nude taking a crazy position, and you'd have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you'd do a one-minute drawing.
In the middle of my second year at school, in 1943, I got drafted into the army, was gone for three years, and when I came back, I tried to get into the painting classes which I wanted, but because of all the returned GIs [the GI Bill], everyone was in school and the classes were all full. So I looked at the catalogue and found that there was a ceramic class offered and that there was space in that. I registered for a ceramic class and some drawing classes.
People were very nice to me. They knew I didn't have the money to do figure-drawing classes, so they let me annex the figure-drawing classes that the animators had.
I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.
I was really grateful for the photography classes, the art classes, and the video classes. They would let me skip all my other classes and stay and work on my projects.
There was a period there where I was like, "No, no, no, this is crazy. I don't want to take any more drawing classes and talk about what looks best. I want to study math and psychology and physics and all these nerdy things with computers." That was fun and great, but that didn't work out. At the end of high school, I was like, "Uhh, what's easier? Drawing is easier, I'll do that".
I thought I would draw or paint or be an architect. I was always drawing portraits. My mom put me in art classes in the summer.
When I was in sixth grade, they slashed the budgets for all of our school art programs, so my grandparents enrolled me in art classes at Worcester Art Museum, which I attended from sixth to 12th grade.
At 11, I went to Misha's school for two summers. So when I wasn't in that school, I was taking classes at David Howard or Robert Denver's studios - kind of legendary places - and there was one summer where Alexander Godunov sort of took me under his wing; the memory's a little murky, but I felt as if I was his project for those weeks.
I've always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.
Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.
The ability to draw from life determines the artist's skill. This is why live drawing classes have always been at the top of the curriculum for properly structured academic workshops.
My school in St. Louis is great. They basically created a program where I can do online classes and independent studies when I'm traveling. But then I still get to go home and take classes in a normal school environment.
Everything in life is drawing, if you want. Drawing is quintessential to knowing the self. Art that survives from one generation to the next is the art that actually carries something that tells society about self.
Yeah, I can't separate the art from the music and the music from the art. I think that stems from going to school for film first, and kind of stumbling onto music as my career.
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