36 quotes
As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile. It's like a leaf in the fall; it hangs and when it drops you don't know where it's drifting.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
..people always talk about painting, because basically painting does not talk.
The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth.
in Dutch: Ik schilder als een barbaar in deze barbaarse tijd.
That is what he used to do, what he is doing now for the last hears. He is the only painter who paints like that.. ..like the wind, like the ocean, like the light, like the sunlight, like the moonlight, far away from everything, without any image..
..And his painting is like the wind, like a breeze blowing the paint across the canvas, so unreal, so loose and far away from the worldly life.
To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.
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, a gesture of colour (1992)
There exists an insanity that touches on a higher level, by knowledge or instinct. That insanity of life I try to put in my painting. It has nothing to do with any morals or laws. It is there and it is insane.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
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 – the complete sculptures (1990)
[artists are people] who employ matter between birth and death. Matter is something to use, not possess.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
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, a gesture of colour (1992)
Willem de Kooning, they say, lost his memory. He lost his worldly memory. He lost the names of the people, he lost their faces.. .This is one of the reasons he paints as a real painter.
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.
Knowledge isolates phenomena and things to observe with.. ..nothing is isolatable or can be removed from its environment. Anything which becomes isolated ceases to exist. It is like the violent refusal of someone to play a game in which everyone cheats.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
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 – the complete sculptures (1990)