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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
Results
Drawings
Made
Hand
Slide
Mind
Eyes
Slides
Always
Interest
Closed
Eye
Drawing
Hands
Surprise
Image
Feel
Paper
Feels

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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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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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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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I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
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Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
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Art should not have to be a certain way.
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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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Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
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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 texture of experience is prior to everything else.
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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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Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
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In art one idea is as good as another.
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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
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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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Content is a glimpse.
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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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An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.
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