Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kehinde Wiley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 28
Painter
LA
California
Moment
Believing
Incarnations
Everyone
Transformation
Transformations
Artist
Stopped
Weirdest
Moments
Artists
Myriad
Art
Criticism
Incarnation
Believe
Happened
Purposes
Things
Ability
Cynical
World
Purpose
Engage

More quotes by Kehinde Wiley

Image
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
Image
Your best as an artist is to create something that resonates for you.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I think that I'm increasingly aware of the fact that in order to work towards any statement that's radically global or universal, you have to start in a place that's radically intimate and particular.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I love the idea of engaging religious sentiment and how that vocabulary has evolved over time.
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
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
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
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.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
It was something that came sort of matter-of-factually. Because there - it's like really - real honest engagement with the people around me and just like really honestly being a little bit confused, quite frankly, about Harlem.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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
Image
When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
Kehinde Wiley
Image
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