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

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The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
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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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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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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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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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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
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I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.
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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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You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
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I have to change to stay the same.
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The past does not influence me I influence it.
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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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The 'Women' had to do with the female painted through all ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light - all this silly talk about line, colour and form - because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.
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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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I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
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Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
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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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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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