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

Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Painting
Problems
Problem
Easel
European
Western

More quotes by 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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When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
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I love being able to have a team.
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I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
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As a twin, I operate with twin desires.
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I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.
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I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
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I love being a portraitist.
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There's something really cool about being able to fly to South Africa and watch one of the most talented African footballers wearing a shoe on the field.
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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.
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It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.
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I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day?
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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.
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The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
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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.
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All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.
Kehinde Wiley