Top 55 Kehinde Wiley Quotes

I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!

Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting’s all about light. And it’s about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends.

Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.

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.

In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.

I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.

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.

Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.

When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the ’60s, and a social collective.

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

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

It’s so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.

I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated – I’m not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization – what I’m trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don’t really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men – how they’re perceived in public and private spaces – and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.

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

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.

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I’m at my best, I’m trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don’t have all the answers.

Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.

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.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There’s a dissonance between inside and outside.

One of the things that has inspired me so much is knowing that I felt like I could never measure up.

What you have in my work is one person‘s path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable.

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

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.

The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States – quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world – means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation.

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.

The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn’t get any better than that.

The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.

I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.

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.

Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.

Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it’s an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.

During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs – you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through – but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.

I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.

It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you’re a kid.

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.

I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.

I’ve fished everywhere I’ve traveled.

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

I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.

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.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

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.

If art can be at the service of anything, it’s about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.

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

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.

I know how young black men are seen. They’re boys – scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.