Willem de Kooning Quotes

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.