7/8C Kehinde Wiley inspired self-portraits- 2019/20

Artist Kehinde Wiley was born in California in 1977. His father is from Nigeria and his mother is African-American. For most of Wiley’s career, he has created large, vibrant, patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of figures drawn from seventeenth through nineteenth-century Western art. He (mostly) finds models from the street, strangers who don’t necessarily fit into the typical portrait sitting set. In his work, Wiley does the opposite; he juxtaposes the high status of those shown in traditional portraits with the everyday people he represents. his paintings often blur the boundaries between traditional and contemporary.

7/8C students applied the grid method to enlarge a color photograph of themselves into a pencil drawing using a variety of lead pencils to achieve shading and form. The motifs on the background were repeated and overlapped. This vibrant backgrounds combined with the black and white drawings created high contrast.