Quotes from Kehinde Wiley

What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.

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.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

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.

Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.

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.

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.

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

I think that at its best you just have to respect each arena for what they can do well.

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.

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.

It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.

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.

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.

Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends.

Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

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.

I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

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.

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

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.

Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.

In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.