Willem De Kooning Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.

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

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

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.

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers ... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focussed 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.

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

The past does not influence me; I influence it.

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

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

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

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

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

If I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.

When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it necessary to make sure of where things and people came from, well then, I came from 36 Union Square ... I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence.

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.

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 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.

Art should not have to be a certain way,

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

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

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.

I have to change to stay the same.

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

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

Content is a glimpse.

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

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history..