Lost and Found.(The Talk of the Town)(Kehinde Wiley )

The painter Kehinde Wiley first travelled to Nigeria in 1997. He was trying to find his father, whom he had never met, or, more crucially for a portraitist, seen. (His mother didn't have any photographs.) After several weeks in Lagos, he found his dad, who welcomed him. But--like any Telemachus or Luke Skywalker--Wiley, who was born in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn, was also looking for a sense of belonging, and his homecoming was not as seamless as he had dreamed. Still, the place has a pull on him. In December, he attended his half sister's wedding, in the city of Uyo. He brought his mother, who had not seen his father in thirty years.

A new show of ten of Wiley's paintings, entitled "The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar," opened recently at the Studio Museum in Harlem. ("The World Stage" is an ongoing series. Last year was China. Up next: India, Brazil.) His work from West Africa, Wiley has said, has "an extra dimension," but he admitted, the other day at his studio, in Greenpoint, that artistically his forays into the region were as trying as his personal ones. "The people, in general, were different physically--a lot taller, darker," he said. "I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone." He pinched a biceps. "But there you're using blues instead of browns. I did some pretty shitty painting that didn't have the luminosity I'm obsessed with, that light popping off bodies, that brings a certain hopefulness to something." On the floor in front of an unfinished canvas was a Chinet paper plate, which Wiley had been using as a palette, smeared with autumny-colored oil paints, like the leftovers of a Thanksgiving dinner.

Throughout Wiley's career, he has used civilians, plucked from the sidewalk or the shopping mall, as sitters for his portraits, which are epic in scale and typically feature young, trendily dressed black men (do-rags, diamonds, N.B.A. jerseys) assuming the heroic postures of Van Dyck's and Velazquez's dukes and burghers (walking sticks, steeds). Street casting, and its serendipities, are a big part of his process. "I get some crazy responses," Wiley, who was barefoot and had on jeans and a T-shirt featuring a naked Barbie with door-knocker earrings, said. "People are, like, 'This is totally sleazy, what's up?' " For a show in Columbus, Ohio, a few years ago, accompanied by a documentary crew, he approached a ...