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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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Willem de Kooning
Age: 92 †
Born: 1904
Born: April 24
Died: 1997
Died: March 19
Artist
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Drawer
Painter
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University Teacher
R'dam
Willem De Kooning
Willem DeKooning
William de Kooning
Willem Dekooning
willem de kooning
Necessarily
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More quotes by Willem de Kooning
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
Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
Willem de Kooning
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
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
Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
Willem de Kooning
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
Im not someone whos ever said anything definitive about his work. In my life also I have very little fixed form. I can change overnight.
Willem de Kooning
An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.
Willem de Kooning
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Willem de Kooning
The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
Willem de Kooning
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
You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
Willem de Kooning
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
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
In art one idea is as good as another.
Willem de Kooning
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
I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.
Willem de Kooning
The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
Willem de Kooning
Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.
Willem de Kooning
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