Kehinde Wiley Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience, this is how I have come to the paintings I do now.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Past, Years, Black

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• 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

  Moving, Choices, Details

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Team, Flower, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Painting, Problem, Western

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Powerful, Past, Class

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Wall, Men

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Moving, Artist, Men

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• At the same time I really enjoy painting flesh.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Flesh, Painting, Enjoy

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Painting, Influence, Ends

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Talking, Ideas

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Girl, Art, Museums

  Interview with M.I.A., www.interviewmagazine.com. November 19, 2008.

• 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

  Art, Book, Mean

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Believe, Mean, Views

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Hands, Feet, Today

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• 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

  Fun, Love Is, Interesting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I happen to be a twin. I grew up half of my life with someone who looks and sounds like me. And I believe it's possible to hold twin desires in your head, such as the desire to create painting and destroy painting at once. The desire to look at a black American culture as underserved, in need of representation, a desire to mine that said culture and to lay its parts bare and look at it almost clinically.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Believe, Black, Desire

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• If I were making paintings of a bowl of fruit it would still be viewed through some sort of political lens, because the viewer wants to create a type of narrative around the political theme when they look at work depicting black and brown models.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Political, Black, Want

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• My paintings at their best take that vocabulary and attempt to transpose that into a form that gives respect not only to the history of painting but also to those people who look and sound like me.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Vocabulary, People, Giving

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I use those expectations as a color on my palette, a certain temperature in the room. You can use those expectations for the great punchline, but also for a great painting, in society.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Color, Expectations, Use

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• You know, I'm incredibly blessed to be able to have this level of choice as an artist today. In this economy, it's something that I, you know, pinch myself at constantly, just thinking about how I could wake up tomorrow and decide I'm going to start painting this or that. So it's good.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Blessed, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Going back to that idea that painting sits still and that we give ourselves over to it over time. There's a difference between living with - imagine if this were sitting in your living room for 15 years. You'd probably understand the contours of it.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Differences, Years, Ideas

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're all here talking about it today. It still lives. I don't believe in ghosts, but these are contemporary ghosts.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Believe, Talking, Europe

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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

  Past, Play, Doe

  "'I try to create a place of disorientation' - interview with Kehinde Wiley". Interview With Anna Savitskaya, artdependence.com. February 16, 2015.

• 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

  Artist, Copying, Way

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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

  Kehinde Wiley

  Race, Class, Painting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin