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An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.

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
Makes
Art
Didn
Someone
Invent
Artist

More quotes 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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I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting
Willem de Kooning
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Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.
Willem de Kooning
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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
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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
Willem de Kooning
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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
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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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An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
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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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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Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
Willem de Kooning
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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
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Art should not have to be a certain way.
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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The past does not influence me I influence it.
Willem de Kooning
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Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
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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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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You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
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