Willem de Kooning Quotes

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

What all of us artists are doing is using our pain as material to create our work.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action.

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.

I know how demanding the process of creation is.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

If I'm feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

I don't like watching people work if they're making art.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

There is always an emotional element to anything that you make.

I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.

It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

What I do is create images, period.

I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.

As a filmmaker, like any artist, when something affects me emotionally I think about it in those terms. It's my way of dealing with my thoughts, my fears and my hardships. I think the same can be said with any artist. For a musician, you're going to write a song about something that affects you emotionally.

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.