Quotesdtb.com
Home
Authors
Quotes of the day
Top quotes
Topics
Karel Appel quotes
I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression.
Karel Appel
My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image.
Karel Appel
I don't paint, I hit.
Karel Appel
The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.
Karel Appel
Every day I have to be awake to escape... The whole world is sleepy. It is a real fight to be awake, to see everything new, for the first time in your life.
Karel Appel
When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, The 'Leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.
Karel Appel
If I had not become a painter, I would surely have become a clown.. .. because I make people laugh.. .. Faces deformed by suffering, humour or work. Often crazy. They then became imaginary, when I adorned them with movements free colours depending on the head. The colour too become clown-like.
Karel Appel
You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture... The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.
Karel Appel
('My three year old daughter can do as much'.) Yes, it is true, but the difference is that I do it.
Karel Appel
Our civilization is in a continuous state of self-repair. Maybe you have undergone surgery once. In former times you might have died. Today everybody can live on and on; everything around us is repaired, even the spirit. Look at the young artists. They only paint the facade and not the things hidden behind it. I don't say that life is lost its originality. I show straightforwardly the state of repair of civilization.
Karel Appel
It's like this - you are in front of your canvas, you hand holds the paint, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white - but all the time it knows what it wants. So - what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when - with my hands holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms - I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life.
Karel Appel
At the very moment when my ego is unprooted [uprooted? ] and freed of intellectual activities and values, the realization of what is still unknown and uncreated, the silent 'non-form' unity emerges, appearing as childish schizophrenia. The indefinable beginning takes form.
Karel Appel
Now we'll start the song of the wild man who lives on the mountain top, who does not want to be seen let us now start that song without words, without music, come on.. (let's not do anything for at least ten minutes) That's the spirit, there he comes, the song of the inner voice, the song of the primitive man.
Karel Appel
All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same... Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today.
Karel Appel
Of course, I painted before Cobra, as afterwards. Each one of us [CoBrA-artists] had his own personality. Cobra is only a very short period of my life. It was like a crossroads. We crossed paths and each continued on his way.... We [artists] are not born to form groups. A group that lasted for too long would destroy the creative activity of its members.
Karel Appel
Pollock... I also feel like an erupting volcano.
Karel Appel
Theories Are the things and neither idealism nor religions, nor histories nor slogans. The complexity of things themselves, that's what theories are... The thing exists without showing itself, entirely, it does nor appear, theory is the thing.
Karel Appel
When you get older as a painter and you've got the opportunities, the talent and the good fortune and have been provided with everything for getting old, then it's fantastic, because the same brushstroke that you put down is more mature and more poignant than it was when you were young.
Karel Appel
[Karel Appel called out to 'his Night':] You, Beauty! And since I have to account for a body, I have handed this torture over to the executioner.
Karel Appel
Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position.
Karel Appel
Theories / are things... Absence and nonexistence / of theories are things.
Karel Appel
The true artist has no style. Style is an exterior decorative element. The true artist as servant of his matter, transcends it with an absolute freedom.
Karel Appel
Previous
1
(Current)
2
3
Next