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Painting Quotes by Kehinde Wiley

79 Painting quotes by Kehinde Wiley

All Painting quotes Kehinde Wiley’s page

At its best, painting points to who we as human beings value, such as Black Lives Matter. The quotes explain Wiley’s process: starting with a photograph, enhancing features in Photoshop, then painting the final image. He also talks about challenging historic conventions and using a wide art‑history taste to shape his work.

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You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.

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My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

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At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

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I love being a portraitist.

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Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.

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Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

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I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

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Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.

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I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.

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Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.

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That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

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I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.

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In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the…

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The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It…

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In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

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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,…

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My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho…

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I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.

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Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the…

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I've jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there's a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer…

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Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're…

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My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that…

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I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what…

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If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being…

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When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say…

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Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love…

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Going back to that idea that painting sits still and that we give ourselves over to it over time. There's a difference…

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I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to…

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I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very…

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So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in…

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There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and…

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

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So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

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Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

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I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.

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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…

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While I can hire out the portrait, I don't, because it's just - that's where I shine. You know, that's my blood…

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At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value.…

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I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting…

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In some way they are all self-portraits, but I think I know what you mean by asking this - I would say,…

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More by Kehinde Wiley

Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces,…

The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely…

One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the…

At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if…

My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened,…

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.

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…

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's…

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black…

I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black…

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And…