Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
Willem de Kooning
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Work
Make
Picture
Happiness
Whether
Happy
Artist
Problem
More quotes by Willem de Kooning
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
Willem de Kooning
Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
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
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 texture of experience is prior to everything else.
Willem de Kooning
In art one idea is as good as another.
Willem de Kooning
You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
Willem de Kooning
I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
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
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
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
I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
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
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Willem de Kooning
The drawings that interest me most are made with closed eyes. With eyes closed, I feel my hand slide down on the paper. I have an image in mind, but the results always surprise me.
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
An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.
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
Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
Willem de Kooning
Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented
Willem de Kooning
