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You know, one of my - one of my best and, I think, most enlightening moments was when I was contacted by Michael Jackson. And he requested that I paint his portrait.
Kehinde Wiley
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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Portraits
Michael
Paint
Moments
Contacted
Best
Requested
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Portrait
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Jackson
More quotes by Kehinde Wiley
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
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
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
As a twin, I operate with twin desires.
Kehinde Wiley
I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn Museum [Brooklyn, NY] And I'd be honored to be in your work.
Kehinde Wiley
My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
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
I love being a portraitist.
Kehinde Wiley
I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.
Kehinde Wiley
I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.
Kehinde Wiley
We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.
Kehinde Wiley
I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
Kehinde Wiley
I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
Kehinde Wiley
When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
Kehinde Wiley
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
Kehinde Wiley
Joseph Gotto, yeah. Just all-around one of the more inspiring artists - not because of any sort of specific content direction, but rather the respect that I had for his own work and the ability for him to translate his ideas into useful form for me as a student.
Kehinde Wiley
There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.
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
Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.
Kehinde Wiley
I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.
Kehinde Wiley