Kehinde Wiley Analysis

Kehinde wiley is one artist I admire so much and I’ve never had the opportunity to really go into details who exactly he is other than what’s on the surface. I choose this article from GQ.com because it explains in detail the creative process of one of the most celebrated painters in the world. Wiley is not your regular painter, he’s in a world of his own and his uniqueness sets him apart from his contemporaries. He is well known for portraits of young African-American men staged in heroic poses, evoking famous portraits from art history. Born in Los Angeles, California. He started painting in year 2000. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art. Wiley’s early work consists of Photo-Realistic paintings of men, whom he had met on the streets in Harlem, set against a floral background. In all of his work, Wiley combines a wide range of references from classical painting and pop culture.
Wiley’s creative process is pretty unique and very random. It could start from just having fun in a beach to being a masterpiece. As playful as he might seem in the beach, he’s actually coming up with ideas. His eyes are on the guys he sees around from boys playing soccer balls to teens riding horses though not
More often than not, it shows a solitary figure, an attractive man in his 20s, enacting a scene from an old-master painting. Dressed in contemporary garb — a hooded sweatshirt, perhaps, or a Denver Broncos jersey — the man might be crossing the Swiss Alps on horseback with the brio of Napoleon or glancing upward, prophet-style, golden light encircling his head.In layman’s terms, his art is a skilled remix. He rearranges racial power dynamics, conceptions of beauty, gender, and “the gaze.” It makes us think about pop iconography and the history of portraiture” Deborah, S (2015, January 28) Kehinde Wiley Puts a Classical Spin on His Contemporary Subjects The New York