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At age 20 I went to go find my father in Nigeria. And after much toil, I finally figured out exactly where he was. And there's something about seeing your father for the first time - my mother destroyed all pictures of him.

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Much
Went
Something
Seeing
Nigeria
Time
Age
Figured
Father
Toil
Mother
Pictures
Find
Destroyed
Firsts
Finally
First
Exactly

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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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.
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It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in the 21st century, making these high-priced luxury goods, traveling the world, pointing at these people, behooves me to have a point of view and to say something about it.
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I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.
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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
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I love being able to have a team.
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I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.
Kehinde Wiley
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Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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So sometimes you have to play your hand and sort of push in a direction. And I think that masculinity is the driving point for a lot of the way that people, like, posture in the work.
Kehinde Wiley
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This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.
Kehinde Wiley
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Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.
Kehinde Wiley
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Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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I love the flexibility of saying, Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work. But in the end, it's a possibility.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
Kehinde Wiley