Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

Image
One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I enjoy Chicago as one of the great American cities. When I come here and take a taxi from the airport, I meet a young man from Somalia. I meet a young man from Eritrea who engages with this nation with a sense of hope and a sense of desire. But we also we know that there are other elements of this nation that are toxic.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
The expectations of the viewer are what you're asking about. And the expectations of the viewer are manifold. However, they are very fixed, given who I am in the world. People have certain expectations of me as an artist.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
I love being a portraitist.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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