Carolina QuotesYou know the real world, this so-called real world, is just something you put up with. Like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world. Then I'm in the real world – I'm on the beam. Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right. When I'm slipping, I say: he, this is interesting. It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Quote from film script Sketchbook 1, Time inc; 1960.
- year
- 1960
Cite this record
“You know the real world, this so-called real world, is just …” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-347E432B85. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/347e432b85
More from Willem de Kooning
The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
Personally, I do not need a movement. What was given to me, I take for granted. Of all movements, I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection - a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practise [sic] his intuition. It didn't want to get rid of what went before. Instead it added something to it. The parts that I can appreciate in other [art] movements came out of Cubism. Cubism became a movement, it didn't set out to be one. It has force in it, but it was no 'force-movement.' 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.
For really, when you think of all the life and death problems in the art of the Renaissance, who cares if a Chevalier is laughing or that a young girl has a red blouse on.