Willem de Kooning
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.Collection: Attitude
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.Collection: Art
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
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.
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
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.
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.
I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.Collection: Looks
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Ideas
What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.Collection: 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.Collection: Eye
I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one paintingCollection: Color
Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree.Collection: Tree
You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.Collection: Dies
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.Collection: Encounters
The texture of experience is prior to everything else.Collection: Texture
Even abstract shapes must have a likenessCollection: Shapes
The past does not influence me; I influence it.Collection: Inspirational
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. An artist is someone who makes art too. He did not invent it. How it started — "to hell with it." It is obvious that it has no progress. The idea of space is given him to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space. He fills it with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Silly
Content is a glimpse.Collection: Vision
I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.Collection: Thinking
Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.Collection: Abstract
The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.Collection: Artist
Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Thinking
Flesh was the reason why oil painting was inventedCollection: Oil
If I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.Collection: Space
If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Thinking
Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.Collection: Art
In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Littles
In art one idea is as good as another.Collection: Art
I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.Collection: Baseball
Art should not have to be a certain way.Collection: Art
An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Rain
The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time. For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Artist
I read somewhere that Rubens said students should not draw from life, but draw from all the great classic casts. Then you really get the measure of them, you really know what to do. And then, put in your own dimples. Isn't that marvelous!Collection: Dimples