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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
Drawings
Mind
Hand
Slide
Always
Eyes
Slides
Interest
Closed
Eye
Drawing
Hands
Surprise

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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
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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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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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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
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I have to change to stay the same.
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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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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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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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Art should not have to be a certain way.
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Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
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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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Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
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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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The past does not influence me I influence it.
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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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In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.
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The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time. For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.
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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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