Elaine de Kooning famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Events #Verbs #Nouns
Every artist returns to things. The drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist, no doubt they crop up again and again.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Children #Artist #Ideas
I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Character #Style
Artists are like cockroaches; everything is grist for the mill.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Artist #Cockroaches #Mills
Women can also be creative in total isolation. I know excellent women artists who do original work without any response to speak of. Maybe they are used to lack of feedback. Maybe they are tougher.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Artist #Creative #Isolation
Inspiration is indispensable to my work, but it is hard to come by. It is there or it is not; it is a gift of the gods.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Inspiration #Indispensable
I made my first trip west of the Hudson and it was a revelation. The naked musculature of the Rockies was overpowering and my painting responded.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Naked #West #Firsts
For one thing, I want gesture-any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture-gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gesture of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. I've often thought of my paintings as having an axis around which everything revolves.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Color #Space #Light
Art has been hijacked by nonartists. It's been taken over by bookkeeping. The whole thing is so corrupt. But I suppose that's okay. For artists, everything is grist for the mill. Artists are like cockroaches; we can't be stamped out.
-- Elaine de Kooning

#Art #Taken #Cockroaches

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.
All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written, but by the spoken word.
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
[On her recently widowed father's much younger wife:] My father has been very busy in conjugating the verb to love, and I assure you he declines its moods and tenses inimitably.
To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.
Consider incompleteness as a verb.
James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.
Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.
Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.

Elaine de Kooning famous quotes

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