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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
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Drawer
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University Teacher
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Willem De Kooning
Willem DeKooning
William de Kooning
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willem de kooning
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More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
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
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
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
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
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
Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.
Willem de Kooning
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
I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting
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
I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.
Willem de Kooning
