Quote

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

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
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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
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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!
Willem de Kooning
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
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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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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Content is a glimpse.
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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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.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.
Willem de Kooning
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Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
Willem de Kooning
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I have to change to stay the same.
Willem de Kooning
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The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
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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If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning