Willem de Kooning Quotes

Color is a passion; painting is a passion.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.

If I was painting a picture, I wouldn't want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I'd rather show people what it looks like when it's done.

When I wake up, I can't wait to get to the studio, go into the paint room.

If you're going to paint extremely, you need a big piece of canvas.

I keep a steady supply of paintbrushes and canvases. I like to paint. I'm not some great artist.

At the same time that I'm finding the color world I want, I'm also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves.

Imagine painting all the statues in the world in the color of the sky

I try to create paintings that are a window for the imagination. If people look at my work and are reminded of the way things once were, or perhaps, the way they could be, then I've done my job.

Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape.

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.

Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.

Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.

I like charcoal drawing a lot. I'm not very good, but I always find myself buying canvases and paints whenever I'm on location, because I always have this ambition to fill the hotel room I'm in and turn it into an art studio.

Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the colors in the palette, that just kills creativity.

Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing as fine for putting an atmosphere round things. Carmine is the red of wine and is warm and lively like wine. The same goes for emerald green too. It's false economy to dispense with them, with those colors. Cadmium as well.

It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.

Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.