Willem de Kooning Quotes
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Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.
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I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
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Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.
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The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
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Once, after finishing a picture, I thought I would stop for awhile, take a trip, do things-the next time I thought of this, I found five years had gone by.
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You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
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Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future... Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
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Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.
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I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.
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Im not someone whos ever said anything definitive about his work. In my life also I have very little fixed form. I can change overnight.
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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
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Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
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Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
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And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.
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Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.
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Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
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My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.
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If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
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I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.
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If I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.
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Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think... of art as a situation of comfort.
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I have to change to stay the same.
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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.