Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Willem De Kooning, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Willem De Kooning quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 48 Willem De Kooning quotes for you to read and share.
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
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 think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape. -- 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
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
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
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
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
Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree. -- Willem De Kooning
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
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
I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting -- 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
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
I have to change to stay the same. -- 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
The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time. -- Willem De Kooning
Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again. -- Willem De Kooning
You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies. -- Willem De Kooning
Content is a glimpse. -- Willem De Kooning
In art one idea is as good as another. -- Willem De Kooning
Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented -- Willem De Kooning
The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone. -- Willem De Kooning
And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody. -- Willem De Kooning
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. -- 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
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. -- 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
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
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 don't paint to live, I live to paint. -- 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
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
Art should not have to be a certain way, -- Willem De Kooning
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will. -- Willem De Kooning
I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art. -- Willem De Kooning
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
Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does. -- Willem De Kooning
An artist is someone who makes art ... He didn't invent it ... -- Willem De Kooning
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns. -- Willem De Kooning
Even abstract shapes must have a likeness -- Willem De Kooning
The past does not influence me; I influence it. -- 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
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content. -- 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
