Carolina QuotesArt 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.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Beyond the Aesthetic, Robert Motherwell, Design 47, April 1946, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 101. — Original in Dutch: Kunst lijkt me nooit volledig of zuiver te maken. Het is of ik altijd verwikkeld ben in het melodrama van de alledaagsheid. [...]
- year
- 1946
- locator
- p. 101
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“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem t…” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B95F97C328. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b95f97c328
More from Willem de Kooning
But I find, because of modern painting, that things which couldn't be seen in terms of painting, things you couldn't paint.. ..it is not that you paint them, bit is the connection. I imagine that Cézanne, when he painted a ginger pot with apples, must have been very grotesque in his day, because a still life was something set up of beautiful things. It may be very difficult, for instance, to put a Rheingold bottled beer on the table and a couple of glasses and a package of Lucky Strike [cigarets]. I mean, you know, there are certain things you cannot paintat a particular time, and it takes a certain attitude how to see those things, in terms of art.
I make a little mystique for myself. Since I have no preference or so-called sense of color, I could take almost everything that could be some accident of a previous painting. Or I set out to make a series. I take, for instance, some pictures where I take a color, some arbitrary color I took from some place. Well, this is gray maybe, and I mix the color for that, and then I find out that when I am through with getting the color the way I want it, I have six other colors in it, to get that color; and then I take those six colors and I use them also with this color. It is probably like a composer does a variation on a certain theme. But it isn't technical, it isn't just fun.
Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all.. .It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.