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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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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
Personal
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Canvas
Whatever
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Historical
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Art
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Certain
Soon
Circumscribes

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Willem de Kooning
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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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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
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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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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I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
Willem de Kooning
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An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Willem de Kooning
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Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
Willem de Kooning
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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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I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
Willem de Kooning
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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.
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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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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Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
Willem de Kooning
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In art one idea is as good as another.
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.
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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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