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

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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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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I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting
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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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Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
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Content is a glimpse.
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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
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Man's own form in space - his body - was a private prison and that it was because of this imprisoning misery - because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.
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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
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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 idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
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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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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.
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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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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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Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
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I have to change to stay the same.
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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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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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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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If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
Willem de Kooning