Kehinde Wiley

                                         Kehinde Wiley

                                                           

                       

       

Resources:

Long Video Link: http://www.pbs.org/video/kehinde-wiley-economy-grace-full-episode/

Q&A with the artist...

When did you first get interested in painting? 

I began with studying art back in LA as a young kid. I first went to art school when I was about 11 and went to big museums in Southern California. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the late 80’s  and I was fortunate because my mother was very much focused on getting me, my twin brother, and other siblings out of the hood.

On weekends I would go to art classes at a conservatory. After school, we were on lockdown. It was something I hated, obviously, but in the end it was a lifesaver. In art school, I just liked being able to make stuff look like other stuff. It made me feel important. Back then, it was basic apples and fruit and understanding light and shadow. From there I did the body and a lot of self-portraiture. So much of what I do now is a type of self-portraiture. As an undergrad at the Art Institute of San Francisco, I really honed in on the technical aspects of painting and being a masterful painter. 

What typically inspires a painting?

My goal was to be able to paint illusionistically (The use of illusionary techniques and devices in art or decoration) and master the technical aspects, but then to be able to fertilize that with great ideas. I was trained to paint the body by copying the Old Master paintings. In my paintings I ask myself: What are these guys doing?’ They’re assuming the poses of colonial masters, the former bosses of the Old World. Whenever I do photo shoots for paintings, I pull out a stack of books, whether it be something from the High Renaissance or the late French Rococo or the 19th century, it’s all thrown together in one big jumble.

I take the figure out of its original environment and place it in something completely made up. Most of the backgrounds I end up using are sheer decorative devices. Things that come from things like wallpaper or the architectural façade ornamentation of a building, and in a way it robs the painting of any sense of place or location, and it’s located strictly in an area of the decorative.

Why do you paint mainly paint African Americans?

I loved when I walked into LACMA as a kid and seeing Kerry James Marshall’s grand barbershop painting.(see below) But it was thrown into very sharp relief when thinking about the absence of other black images in that museum. There was something absolutely heroic and fascinating about being able to feel a certain relationship to the institution and the fact that these people happen to look like me on some level. 

One of the reasons I’ve chosen some of these zones had to do with the way you fantasize, whether it be about your own people or far-flung places, and how there’s the imagined personality and look and feel of a society, and then there’s the actuality that sometimes is jarring, as a working artist and traveling from time to time. I do it because I want to see people who look like me.

Kehinde's favortie painting from the LACMA when he was a kid...