Fine art is a lot of things – grand, impressive, beautiful. But, if we’re being honest, it can also be a bit boring. Most of the art we see in museums today belonged to a different era when art was done by commission, and the only people who could afford it were the rich and powerful. The result is that most fine art depicts basically the same subjects – princes, nobles, generals, and powerful merchants. It’s all very impressive, but our reality is so different from what these paintings depict. It’s hard to relate to a prince on a horse when most of us barely even know princes.
And that’s exactly what Kehinde Wiley set out to fix. Wiley is a Nigerian-American artist currently based in New York. He was trained in the classical tradition in some of America’s finest institutes – the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University’s School of Art. And while he loved the traditional techniques, he was troubled by how unrelatable the themes and subjects of these paintings were.
That is why he set out to reinvent traditional paintings. Instead of drawing in a new, modern style, or going for old-time technique and subjects, he decided to take his classical training and apply it to our modern world. Instead of drawing princes and generals, he draws regular folks in regular clothes – but with his incredible skill, turns then into a grand masterpiece. Today, he’s one of the most celebrated artists of our time, and it’s easy to see why – he can take the most ordinary person, and turn them into royalty.
