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" 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. "

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" 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

" It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid. "

" 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. "

" Europe has been a place of refuge. Why should it stop with black and brown bodies? "

" When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers. "

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

" What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body. "

" What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture. "

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

Kehinde Wiley

Point

Painting

" I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work. "

" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "

" 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

" The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States - quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world - means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids but every population group in this nation. "

" Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic. "

" 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. "

" Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. "

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

" 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. "

" I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets. "

" There's something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That's the magic of painting. "

Kehinde Wiley

You

Cool

" In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination. "

" There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value. "

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

" You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative. "

" My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others. "

Kehinde Wiley

Language

Child

" My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint. "

Kehinde Wiley

Matter

Work

" My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic. "

" In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. "

" I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone. "

" 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. "