What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.
I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.
I happen to be a twin. I grew up half of my life with someone who looks and sounds like me. And I believe it's possible to hold twin desires in your head, such as the desire to create painting and destroy painting at once. The desire to look at a black American culture as underserved, in need of representation, a desire to mine that said culture and to lay its parts bare and look at it almost clinically.
I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.
On the contrary, my desire is that the viewer sees the background coming forward in the lower portion of the canvas, fighting for space, demanding presence.
Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.
Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.
If I have the same plan to go into the streets, find random strangers, use art-historical referent from their - from the specific location, to use decorative patterns from this location, that's a rule. That's a set of patterns that you can apply to all societies. But what gives rise or what comes out of each experiment is so radically different.
I'd like to walk that fine line between the authentic artist self and the manufactured artist self. I'd like to exist outside of a set of expectations or assumptions about what the Kehinde Wiley brand is. And I'd like to walk towards something that's a bit more unpredictable, human.
How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster?
There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.
I try to create a place of disorientation.
I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.
I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.
I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?
I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was in that studio trying my best to feel content with myself. I had, like, a stipend. I had a place to sleep. I had a studio to work in. I had nothing else to think about, you know. And that's - that was a huge luxury in New York City.
I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments.
Most people say, "Hell, no. I don't know who you are. This scares me. Like, I'm not interested in this."Another way of looking at these paintings is, these are the guys who said yes.
I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.
What we have now is a communication ability. We have the ability to see working ideas that are going on in the great cities throughout the world and whether you live in Shanghai or you live in Sao Paulo, you have the ability of seeing and knowing the ideas of some of the greatest minds of our generation.
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
