Latest Kehinde Wiley Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• When I look back at my paintings, they don't give me a sense of where I was when I first met that guy. They don't give me a sense of what I felt like when I first saw that original source material. They give me a sense of the world that I'm trying to create. And we all just have to deal with that.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Giving, Guy, Trying

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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

  Opportunity, Reality, Light

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I like to play with the conventions around what we expect of paintings historically. But I also like to play with the conventions that you expect from a Kehinde Wiley painting, too.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Play, Painting, Conventions

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're all here talking about it today. It still lives. I don't believe in ghosts, but these are contemporary ghosts.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Believe, Talking, Europe

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Believe, Cynical

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Believe, Artist, Culture

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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

  Artist, Talking, Ideas

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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

  Believe, Black, Desire

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• The artists ultimately respond to the public.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• What's interesting about young black American artists within the twentieth century, and increasingly within the twenty-first as well, is that there's this expectation of a political corrective that demands that the artist fixes the ills of the world.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Interesting, Expectations

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Mean, Trying, World

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Thinking, Answers

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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

  Talking, Europe, East

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Powerful, Past, Class

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I enjoy Chicago as one of the great American cities. When I come here and take a taxi from the airport, I meet a young man from Somalia. I meet a young man from Eritrea who engages with this nation with a sense of hope and a sense of desire. But we also we know that there are other elements of this nation that are toxic.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Men, Cities, Airports

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Vocabulary, Stories, Said

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Understanding, Looks, Want

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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

  Differences, Careers, Wife

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• It's a culture. It's - I mean, people obsess over this. And people create subcultures that identify - and there are people in the streets who will recognize certain patterns and signifiers.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Mean, People, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Painting, Should

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Thinking, Arena, Wells

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Believe, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Believe, Purity

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu