Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Struggle, Embodiment, Might

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Yale, Years, Childhood

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Can I - do I have to be obsessed with it and proceed from that? Not always. But when I'm on top of my game, I definitely think about the way that the world sees me and the way that the world thinks about painting. You must.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Thinking, Games, World

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Most people say, "Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this."Another way of looking at these paintings is, these are the guys who said yes.

  Kehinde Wiley

  People, Guy, Scare

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

• 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

• I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

  Kehinde Wiley

  White, People, Done

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• 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

  Real, Book, Mean

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• There's quite obviously the desire to open the rule sets that allow for inclusion or disclusion. I think that my hope would be that my work set up certain type of precedent, that allowed for great institutions, museums and viewers to see the possibilities of painting culture to be a bit more inclusive.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Thinking, Museums, Desire

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I pay my models to work with me, so there becomes this weird sort of economic bartering thing, which made me feel really sort of uncomfortable, almost as though you were buying into a situation - which, again, is another way of looking at those paintings. The body language in those paintings is a lot more stiff.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Pay, Way, Buying

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

• I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Educational, Texture, Shade

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• I think that gave rise to the type of practice that I - that I do now. I think it was informed by a very Marxist almost "use-value"-driven investigation of painting as agent. These are high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers, which are designed to deliver certain communicative effects.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Thinking, Practice, Luxury

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Practice, Want

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• He [Michael Jackson] would choose specific moments. They were art history books that I prefer. They were paintings that he prefers. It's this dance back and forth. We were halfway through the dance. He died.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Book, Painting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

• I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience, this is how I have come to the paintings I do now.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Past, Years, Black

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Moving, Choices, Details

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Team, Flower, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Painting, Problem, Western

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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 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

  Art, Wall, Men

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Moving, Artist, Men

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Flesh, Painting, Enjoy

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Painting, Influence, Ends

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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