Willem de Kooning Quotes

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

Science disembodies; art embodies.

To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?

The map appears to us more real than the land.

How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.

My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

Things are symbols of themselves.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.