71 Quotes by Willem De Kooning

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness.

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

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

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

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.

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.

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

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