The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that rather than imposing order onto nature, we should focus on finding order within ourselves.
Willem De Kooning highlights the misconception that artists impose their own order on the chaotic elements of nature. He argues that true artistry lies not in controlling the external environment, but in achieving a sense of internal order and clarity. This perspective invites individuals to introspect and harmonize their internal chaos rather than attempting to manipulate the world around them, emphasizing self-reflection as a path to artistic expression and understanding.
In practice
This quote could be shared during an art workshop to encourage participants to explore their internal landscape.
I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.
I don't paint to live, I live to paint.
Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future... Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
Im not someone whos ever said anything definitive about his work. In my life also I have very little fixed form. I can change overnight.
Art should not have to be a certain way.
My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.
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