Willem de Kooning quotes
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Willem de Kooning Quotes



Quotes by Willem de Kooning - (21 quotes)

Willem de Kooning - From the Abstraction category:

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Application category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Artists category:

An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it... (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Attitude category:

The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Beginning category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Desperation category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Freedom category:

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Gender category:

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Happiness category:

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Ideas category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Integrity category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Oils category:

Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Order category:

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Portraiture category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Seeing category:

Content is a glimpse. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Space category:

If I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are – that is all the space I need as a painter. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Space category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Spirituality category:

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. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Subject category:

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape. (Willem de Kooning)

Willem de Kooning - From the Time category:

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)

Willem de Kooning - From the Watercolours category:

-to Erje Ayden...
Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does. (Willem de Kooning)