People who - and I think that's been a huge education for me. I think it's a - it's a privilege to be able to meet such a broad cross-section of New York and increasingly the world, and to get a feel of how people respond to visual culture.

I think that the Kehinde Wiley brand is something that I'm working towards expanding and to inclusion.

When I look back at my paintings, they don't give me a sense of where I was when I first met that guy. They don't give me a sense of what I felt like when I first saw that original source material. They give me a sense of the world that I'm trying to create. And we all just have to deal with that.

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day?

You know, I'm incredibly blessed to be able to have this level of choice as an artist today. In this economy, it's something that I, you know, pinch myself at constantly, just thinking about how I could wake up tomorrow and decide I'm going to start painting this or that. So it's good.