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We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.
Kehinde Wiley
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Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Received
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Suppose
Historical
Rules
Toying
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Portraiture
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More quotes by Kehinde Wiley
There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.
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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.
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When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
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
I love being a portraitist.
Kehinde Wiley
I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.
Kehinde Wiley
It never really understood its own situational luxury. And I think that by and large the privilege of being Kehinde Wiley in the 21st century, making these high-priced luxury goods, traveling the world, pointing at these people, behooves me to have a point of view and to say something about it.
Kehinde Wiley
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
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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I love being able to have a team.
Kehinde Wiley
My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
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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.
Kehinde Wiley
I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
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
Mel [Bochner] sets a very high standard. He expects only the best and most thoughtful and rigorous examinations, not only of the history of art but your own practice.
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
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
Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
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
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?
Kehinde Wiley