Willem De Kooning Quotes

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

I have to change to stay the same.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

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.

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

In art one idea is as good as another.

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

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

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

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

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

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

Content is a glimpse.

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.

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

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

An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.

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

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

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented

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

Art should not have to be a certain way.

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

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.

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.

The past does not influence me; I influence it.

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

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.

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.