Carolina QuotesI am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it. And there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance I keep it. If it hasn't, I throw it away.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Quote of de Kooning, in: Modern Artists in America, First Series, R. Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and B. Karpel eds., 1952 p. 12.
- year
- 1952
- locator
- p. 12
Cite this record
“I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I …” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-5D957964DD. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/5d957964dd
More from Willem de Kooning
The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century [1900] a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art.. .The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.
You 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.
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.