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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.

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
Idea
Painting
Paint
Pain
Color
Drama
Keep
Emotion
Horse
Form
Becomes
Figures
Ideas
Lines
Interested
Reducing
Way
Eyes
Line
Putting
Things
Space
Design
Anger
Love
Eye
Taking
Figure

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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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.
Willem de Kooning
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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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Art should not have to be a certain way.
Willem de Kooning
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You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
Willem de Kooning
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I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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The past does not influence me I influence it.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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I have to change to stay the same.
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.
Willem de Kooning
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Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning