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Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
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
Million
Paint
Tree
Millions
Even
Would
Dollars
More quotes by Willem de Kooning
The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
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
If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
Willem de Kooning
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.
Willem de Kooning
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
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
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
I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
Willem de Kooning
You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
Willem de Kooning
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
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
The past does not influence me I influence it.
Willem de Kooning
If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.
Willem de Kooning
If I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.
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
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Willem de Kooning
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
I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.
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
I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.
Willem de Kooning
