Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department. "

Related Quotes:

" Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography. "

Kehinde Wiley

Painting

Life

Long

" My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked. "

" I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated - I'm not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization - what I'm trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don't really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily. "

Kehinde Wiley

Rules

Moments

" I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work. "

" It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence. "

" I've fished everywhere I've traveled. "

Kehinde Wiley

Traveled

Everywhere

" If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw. "

Kehinde Wiley

Sit

Little

" Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends. "

" I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down. "

" At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings. "

" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "

Kehinde Wiley

Elite

Environment

" What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe. "

" If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way. "

" Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation. "

" My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north. "

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

" The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it. "

" Being a kid with black skin in South Central Los Angeles, in a part of the world where opportunity didn't necessarily knock every day, is what gave me this sensibility and drove me to explore my fascination with art. "

" As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook. "

" By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me. "

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

" I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "

" If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world. "

" In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature. "

" I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level. "

" I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties. "

" During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids. "

Kehinde Wiley

Good

Forest

" When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry. "

Kehinde Wiley

Amazing

Library

" I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art. "

" Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope. "