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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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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Truth
Essentials
Ideas
Subject
Really
Telling
Portraiture
Subjects
Interior
Idea
Interiors
Lives
Suspicion
Strong
Romantic
Nature
Essential

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
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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The ability to look at certain patterns with regards to urban fashion, with regards to swagger, with regards to cultural hegemony, with regards to the ways in which young people look at resistance culture as a pattern that should be mimicked and admired.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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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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I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
Kehinde Wiley
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I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
Kehinde Wiley
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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
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You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.
Kehinde Wiley
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What's interesting about my project recently is that I'm going out into broader global spaces but then isolating at the same time - sort of pushing out but then pulling in.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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Just so [becoming a chef ] that I could support my art habit. You know? I mean, this is - this is something where you've been literally given an opportunity to put the world on pause for a second.
Kehinde Wiley
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
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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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I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.
Kehinde Wiley