Kehinde Wiley

“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.”

“I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.”

“My love affair with painting is bittersweet.”

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

“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.”

“When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I thought I'd be a chef by night and paint by day. Now I just have fabulous dinner parties.”

“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.”

“What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable.”

“The way we think about a presidential portrait is one that is imbued with dignity from the outset.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.”

“I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.”