Willem de Kooning Quotes

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.

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.

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.

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

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

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

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.

Content is a glimpse.

The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.

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

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.

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

I have to change to stay the same.

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

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.

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented

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.

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.

In art one idea is as good as another.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

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

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.

Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.

The past does not influence me; I influence it.

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.

Art should not have to be a certain way.

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.

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

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.

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.