Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.
You'll find that street casting in America is a lot different than street casting in different nations.
I had an amazing instructor, Joseph Gotto , who, as a painter, spoke to me as it - he didn't condescend.
Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.
For me, I wanted to create something that's much more driven by a type of selfishness, a type of decadence.
I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story.
I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.
I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.
Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.
When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.
Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.
Artists should be able to thrive and allow their ideas to flourish as much as those in biotechnology or finance.
In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.
Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society.
I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.
I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.
A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.
While I can hire out the portrait, I don't, because it's just - that's where I shine. You know, that's my blood sport.
When I thought about the absolute favourite of favourites or what stood for the best of haute couture, it was Givenchy.
In America , there's a just-add-water reality TV world in which people expect to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.
There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.
[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born.
It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.
One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art.
Usually I bring very attractive women with me to excite interest. I mean, it's a type of, like, strangers-with-candy situation.
What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.
Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.
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 beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.
I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.
I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.
In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.
In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be.
I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.
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.
There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.
I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.
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.
Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.
I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.
I think the pairing of your material practice with your subject is something that is the constant concern of every artist for time immemorial.
In some way they are all self-portraits, but I think I know what you mean by asking this - I would say, it is too idealistic to paint yourself.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
My mother's from Texas. Small town outside of Waco called Downsville. And my father's from Nigeria. And so I guess I'm properly African-American.
Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.
There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.