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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

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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
Must
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Feels
Player
Writing
Team
Something
American
Like
History
Artist
Feel
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Sometimes
Baseball

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.
Willem de Kooning
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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
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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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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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 don't paint to live, I live to paint.
Willem de Kooning
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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
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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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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
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If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
Willem de Kooning
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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
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Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
Willem de Kooning
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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
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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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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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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
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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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
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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
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In art one idea is as good as another.
Willem de Kooning