Carolina QuotesBill [Willem de Kooning] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August' [he painted in 1946].
Elaine de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
In: an tape-recorded interview with Elaine de Kooning on August 27, 1981; conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral Histories.
- form
- interview
- year
- 1981
Cite this record
“Bill [Willem de Kooning] was working on a huge canvas. It wa…” Elaine de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B4F5BDDEC6. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b4f5bddec6
More from Elaine de Kooning
I think there are too damn many institutions on the face of the earth as it is. Robert Graves said: 'As soon as women organize themselves in the male way with societies, memberships and rules, everything goes wrong.' I think that applies to artists, too. The artist stands for everything against institutions.. [Rosalyn Drexler reacted: 'Institutions and clear thought are opposites. You can't have one with the other']. Right! Institution to me means authority, coercion, mindlessness, bureaucracy; it means the Pentagon, the CIA, the army, organized denominational religion, prisons, mental hospitals.
When I was five years old, my mother took me to the Metropolitan. I remember being overwhelmed by the hush — the glamor of the place. Also I used to be mesmerized by the stained-glass windows in church — but it never occurred to me that anyone made them. I thought they were just there, like trees, chairs, houses and the reproductions on the walls at home. I was always drawing, but I didn't make any connection. Then, by the time I was 10 or 11, other kids were asking me for my drawings and were referring to me as an artist. I hadn't given the matter any thought. I just loved to draw. I loved the activity. But when they bestowed the title on me (by then I was reading about artists and going to museums on my own), I thought, oh yes, I'm an artist, and from then on I took it for granted — and I began to compete. I'd read that Raphael had done something by the age of 12 and I'd get very anxious. I became very time-conscious. If I read about someone's great accomplishment at the age of 20, I'd heave a sigh of relief and feel, maybe there's still time. How did you start? [to Rosalyn Drexler ]
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.