Willem de Kooning Quotes
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Content is a glimpse.
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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.
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I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.
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An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
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Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.
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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
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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. An artist is someone who makes art too. He did not invent it. How it started — "to hell with it." It is obvious that it has no progress. The idea of space is given him to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space. He fills it with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.
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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!
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Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.
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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.
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The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.
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An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.
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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.
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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.
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Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
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The past does not influence me; I influence it.
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The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.
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Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.
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I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
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I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting
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I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
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If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
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