11 quotes
My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
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 – the complete sculptures (1990)
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 – the complete sculptures (1990)
The experience of the moment is what's important, and somehow the image, the 'thing' is left over.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
Through play, we renew contact with childhood - My art is childlike.
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures (1990)
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)
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)
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)