Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.
Kehinde Wiley
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.
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.
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.
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.
Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.
My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.
My work is a contemporary call to arms. It is time to get our mojo back. To rediscover our true north.
My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.
Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.
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 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.
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.
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.
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.
Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
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.
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.
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.
We all look at the same object in different ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.
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.
Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
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.
If people looked at me like I was a little different, I would maybe sit next to them, and I would draw.
I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.
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.
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.
You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.
So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.
Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.
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.
Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.
In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.
It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there.
I've fished everywhere I've traveled.
My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
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.
