Willem de Kooning Quotes

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.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

I have to change to stay the same.

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.

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.

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

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.

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.

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.

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.

I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting

Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.

You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

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.

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

The past does not influence me; I influence it.

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented

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.

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.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

Content is a glimpse.