Willem de Kooning Quotes

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

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.

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.

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

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

Content is a glimpse.

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

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

I have to change to stay the same.

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.

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

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.

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.

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

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.

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.

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.