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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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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
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More quotes by Willem de Kooning
The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
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
If I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.
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
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
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.
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
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
Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
Willem de Kooning
Content is a glimpse.
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
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
Willem de Kooning
What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.
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
Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
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 '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
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Willem de Kooning
The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
Willem de Kooning
