Willem de Kooning and Instinct

De Kooning studying a door painting - Woman 1966. Photo: Dan Budnik

DeKooning was 92 at the time of his death.

Ibram Lassow: "I remember the times long ago when Bill [de Kooning] and I would wonder what it would be like to be well known. What a strange thing that he became an internationally famous artist, and the irony is that now he doesn't even know. Now he paints and eats, and that's all."

 "An instinct begins as a conscious impulse.  If you want anything badly and continuously enough-by conscious choice-the desire will become a habit, and eventually, an instinct. Having become an instinct, it will survive even after consciousness has lost it’s drive. When this happens, instinct now supplies the mind with its meanings  . . . my subconscious is only giving me back what I have already put there.  The ‘instinct’ does not come from the depths of nature or from God or some other mysterious source; it comes from my robot, and I put it there.”

p. 72, Colin Wilson, Poetry & Mysticism

 "Artists themselves have no past. They just get older."

-Willem de Kooning