Quotes from Kehinde Wiley

Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends.

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.

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.

Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.

The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.

Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.

Usually I bring very attractive women with me to excite interest. I mean, it's a type of, like, strangers-with-candy situation.

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.

The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].

I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.

What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe.

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'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.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.

In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.

I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.

All art is self-portraiture.