Kehinde Wiley Quotes
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I rarely meet a lot of the people who buy and collect my work.
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I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
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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.
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It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.
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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.
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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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My sexuality is not black and white. I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys.
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I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
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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.
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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.
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I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do.
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Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.
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Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.
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I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama.
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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.
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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 with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
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My love affair with painting is bittersweet.
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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.
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Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
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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 - my version of him - that's in his collection.
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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.
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Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it.
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When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.
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I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.