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The drawings that interest me most are made with closed eyes. With eyes closed, I feel my hand slide down on the paper. I have an image in mind, but the results always surprise me.

Willem de Kooning

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Willem de Kooning
Age: 92 †
Born: 1904
Born: April 24
Died: 1997
Died: March 19
Artist
Designer
Drawer
Painter
Sculptor
University Teacher
R'dam
Willem De Kooning
Willem DeKooning
William de Kooning
Willem Dekooning
willem de kooning
Feel
Image
Feels
Paper
Made
Results
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Mind
Hand
Slide
Always
Eyes
Slides
Interest
Closed
Eye
Drawing
Hands
Surprise

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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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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I read somewhere that Rubens said students should not draw from life, but draw from all the great classic casts. Then you really get the measure of them, you really know what to do. And then, put in your own dimples. Isn't that marvelous!
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An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
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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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Art should not have to be a certain way.
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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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What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.
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Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.
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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 paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.
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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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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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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
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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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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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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
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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'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting
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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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