Willem de Kooning on Culture

There are those now legendary tales of the rivalry between abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack. Even one instance of them fighting in New York's famous The Cedar Bar. Personal demons aside, de Kooning had a more cultured European style personality, and Pollack was a wild man from the west. I had always been fascinated by Pollack's work and had read more about him, I guess taking my own stand in the rivalry.

"For milk to become yogurt it needs culture"

-Willem de Kooning

I love that quote from de Kooning, and as much as I hate to admit it, he shares a closer link to my creative process than Pollack does, or at least equal. For example: de Kooning had a process where he would tear up drawings and use them has a sort of pallet for his paintings, and thought that drawing was vitally important for an artist. This is not dissimilar with what I do with my sketchbook and odd collections of 'doodles' on napkins and bits of paper, junk mail, or whatever is handy at the time, and they way I use those images in my paintings.

de Kooning on the Emotion of Forms

Although he had a very radical gestural style, Abstract Expressionist artist Willem de Kooning never fully abandoned representational imagery, he was similar to Pollack in that his forms usually emerged from his painting style, not necessarily from his conscious mind.

"Forms ought to have the emotion of concrete experience."

(-Willem de Kooning p. 151 Modern American Painting)

The preceding quote from de Kooning especially illustrates just that point. While Jackson Pollack created compositions with no beginning, no end, and tried to draw out the unconcious, de Kooning had a much more visceral approach to painting.