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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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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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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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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You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
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Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
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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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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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An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
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If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.
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It's really absurd to make... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
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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.