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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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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Kids
School
Together
Twin
Matter
Twins
Going
Wild
Think
Streets
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Art
More quotes by Kehinde Wiley
Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And there was, like, trees and sculptures and like - it was, like, this crazy, like, secret garden space.
Kehinde Wiley
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
It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and just like really honestly being a little bit confused, quite frankly, about Harlem.
Kehinde Wiley
He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.
Kehinde Wiley
I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.
Kehinde Wiley
Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
Kehinde Wiley
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
I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
Kehinde Wiley
I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my own set of criteria, which have to do with beauty and a type of utopia that in some ways speaks to the culture I'm located in.
Kehinde Wiley
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
Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.
Kehinde Wiley
Like, the smells and the sights and the sounds. As an artist, you want to sort of be able to engage that and get that down in some way. This is - this is a type of familiarity but a type of radical difference at the same time.
Kehinde Wiley
I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.
Kehinde Wiley
A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.
Kehinde Wiley
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
I would imagine that what you try to do is to - is to be as sensitive to the environment that surrounds you as possible. As you see, my work has become increasingly global. My presence in the world has become increasingly global.
Kehinde Wiley
Mel [ Bochner] held large-form meetings with students. But the stronger points came through when we had the one-on-one critiques. And that's the system that works at Yale. There's the group critiques, and then there's the one-on-one critiques that happen in studio.
Kehinde Wiley
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
In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.
Kehinde Wiley
I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.
Kehinde Wiley