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Always when I look at anyone's art, I get flashes of the person. If I walk into a room and there's a painting by Joan Mitchell, I say, "There's Joannie." Or Grace, if it's Grace Hartigan. And to me all art is self-portraits.

— Elaine de Kooning

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More quotes by Elaine de Kooning

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

I always say I'm an escape artist, Style is something I've always tried to avoid. I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it.

When I painted my seated men, I saw them as gyroscopes. Portraiture always fascinated me because I love the particular gesture of a particular expression or stance.. .Working on the figure, I wanted paint to sweep through as feelings sweep through..

[In the past] women painted women: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, and so forth. And I thought, men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as sex objects.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Elaine de Kooning (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.