Quotes by Kehinde Wiley - Page 6

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.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Luxury
People
Copy Quote
I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Moving
Thinking
Copy Quote
I think that at its best, painting can be an act of juggling perceptions, a hall of mirrors. And it can be a bit confusing and scattering. But as the artist, as the man behind the velvet rope who controls the smoke and the mirrors and the way that things move in the painted space, what I want to do is to try my best to be a good witness.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Men
Artist
Moving
Copy Quote
What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Anxiety
Perfection
Thinking
Copy Quote
If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Giving
Historical
Copy Quote
It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Book
Mean
Copy Quote
That's what I think my job in the world has been, is to sort of try to sit silently a bit and watch it all sort of move and see those small, quiet details, whether it be a small village outside of Colombo [country?] or the favelas of Brazil, where, again, resistance culture is something that you hear resonating in the streets of South Central Los Angeles as well.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Jobs
Country
Moving
Copy Quote
Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, essential components. You have to - you know, at this point I'm so used to operating within given assumptions about art. But when you're explaining art to art students or people who are new to this experience, you have to really go back to the fundamentals.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
People
Teaching
Copy Quote
I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was in that studio trying my best to feel content with myself. I had, like, a stipend. I had a place to sleep. I had a studio to work in. I had nothing else to think about, you know. And that's - that was a huge luxury in New York City.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
New York
Sleep
Copy Quote
It was probably one of the things that gave me a sense of possibility and allowed for me to see beyond the small community that I existed within. You know, I was making friends with young Soviet kids. this is during perestroika. You know, there's bread lines and vodka lines. The entire social structure of what was then the Soviet Union was radically different from what we know today.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Kids
Community
Unions
Copy Quote
I think what's really interesting and useful about this question is that ultimately all art is a type of self-portraiture. And so in the act of identifying yourself, you're using others to get to that point. And so you're parsing out different aspects of different people in the world. You're choosing not only from America but increasingly globally different aspects of what's out there.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
America
Thinking
Copy Quote
For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Flower
Team
Thinking
Copy Quote
When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
East
Europe
Talking
Copy Quote
I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Book
Mean
Real
Copy Quote
While it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Example
May
Reality
Copy Quote
I happen to be a twin. I grew up half of my life with someone who looks and sounds like me. And I believe it's possible to hold twin desires in your head, such as the desire to create painting and destroy painting at once. The desire to look at a black American culture as underserved, in need of representation, a desire to mine that said culture and to lay its parts bare and look at it almost clinically.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Believe
Black
Desire
Copy Quote
Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Artist
Ideas
Talking
Copy Quote
I was recently in Israel doing my work and casting for models in the streets of Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, meeting young Israelis and Palestinians and Falasha, Ethiopian Jews who had migrated to Israel in the '70s. They're obsessed with Bob Marley. They're obsessed with Kanye West. They're obsessed with resistance culture, people who find that they're not necessarily comfortable in their own personal and national skin.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Israel
People
Skins
Copy Quote
I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Beautiful
Block
Copy Quote
It felt really radically uncomfortable. And I was really not sure at first about releasing that body of work. But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought that that position, that location, is something that's just sort of interesting in its own right, as an experience, as a process. Again, we're talking about this rubric, this set of rules, this grid that I toss on top of different locations globally. This is what came out of Africa.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Interesting
Rubrics
Talking
Copy Quote
There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Opportunity
Light
Reality
Copy Quote
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.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Book
School
Copy Quote
In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the hallway, theater students, musical students, art geeks. And it was a kindergarten in the truest sense of the world: a children's garden where I was able to sort of really come into myself as an artist, as a person, sexuality issues - like, all of this became something where there was a firming-up and a knowing that went on.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Children
School
Copy Quote
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.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Careers
Differences
Wife
Copy Quote
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.
Kehinde Wiley / Painter
Art
Men
Wall
Copy Quote

Related Painter Authors

Vincent Van Gogh
Painter
Wednesday, Mar 30, 1853
Tuesday, Jul 29, 1890
Leonardo Da Vinci
Painter
Thursday, Apr 15, 1452
Friday, May 02, 1519
Zhang Xiaogang
Painter
Wyndham Lewis
Painter
Saturday, Nov 18, 1882
Thursday, Mar 07, 1957
Wu Guanzhong
Painter
Friday, Aug 29, 1919
Friday, Jun 25, 2010
Wolf Kahn
Painter
Tuesday, Oct 04, 1927
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Painter
Wednesday, Nov 30, 1825
Saturday, Aug 19, 1905
William Merritt Chase
Painter
Thursday, Nov 01, 1849
Wednesday, Oct 25, 1916
William Holman Hunt
Painter
Monday, Apr 02, 1827
Wednesday, Sep 07, 1910
William Hogarth
Painter
Sunday, Nov 10, 1697
Friday, Oct 26, 1764
William Baziotes
Painter
Tuesday, Jun 11, 1912
Thursday, Jun 06, 1963
William Alexander
Painter
Friday, Apr 02, 1915
Friday, Jan 24, 1997
Will Cotton
Painter
Wayne Thiebaud
Painter
Monday, Nov 15, 1920
Washington Allston
Painter
Friday, Nov 05, 1779
Sunday, Jul 09, 1843

View All Painter Quotes

Top Authors

Dolly Parton
Singer-Songwriter
Saturday, Jan 19, 1946
Jordan Peterson
Psychologist
Carrie Fisher
Actress
Sunday, Oct 21, 1956
Tuesday, Dec 27, 2016
Kim Kardashian
Television Personality
Tuesday, Oct 21, 1980
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34Th U.s. President
Tuesday, Oct 14, 1890
Friday, Mar 28, 1969
Leonardo Da Vinci
Painter
Thursday, Apr 15, 1452
Friday, May 02, 1519
Bob Marley
Singer
Tuesday, Feb 06, 1945
Monday, May 11, 1981
Winston Churchill
Former Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom
Monday, Nov 30, 1874
Sunday, Jan 24, 1965
Niccolo Machiavelli
Historian
Monday, May 03, 1469
Tuesday, Jun 21, 1527
Epictetus
Philosopher
Elon Musk
Investor
Monday, Jun 28, 1971
John Keats
Poet
Saturday, Oct 31, 1795
Friday, Feb 23, 1821
Soren Kierkegaard
Philosopher
Wednesday, May 05, 1813
Sunday, Nov 11, 1855
Pope John Paul Ii
Priest
Tuesday, May 18, 1920
Saturday, Apr 02, 2005
Mae West
Actress
Thursday, Aug 17, 1893
Saturday, Nov 22, 1980

View All Authors

Kehinde Wiley Quotes - Page 6

App & Tools

Related Painter Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Painter Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page