Painters From The Netherlands

"My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image."

"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."

"The experience of the moment is what's important, and somehow the image, the 'thing' is left over."

"a sky of clouds completely 'out of the blue'.. .I'm looking, reflecting, and when it suddenly happens: hey, the clouds, and what clouds! [in interview with , c. 1988]"

"[artists are people] who employ matter between birth and death. Matter is something to use, not possess."

"[Appel] has to shatter, to infringe. It is his deployment. He is a solitary man with a staggering health. He leaves dreaming to matter."

"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."

"Through play, we renew contact with childhood - My art is childlike."

"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."

"Our civilization is in a continuous state of self-repair. Maybe you have undergone surgery once. In former times you might have died. Today everybody can live on and on; everything around us is repaired, even the spirit. Look at the young artists. They only paint the facade and not the things hidden behind it. I don't say that life is lost its originality. I show straightforwardly the state of repair of civilization."

"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."

"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."

"You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture.. .The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions."

"One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience."

"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."

"The wastelands belong to my youth [c. 1930's]. When I was young I played in the outskirts of the city - watching the cranes at the harbour. There was no law but garbage, grass and wildflowers like boys and girls, rough, hot and sexual and full of hidden pleasures. Life and death are overlapping in the wastelands like in my paintings."

"To keep it short and simple.. ..you take the subject, that is for example the wood, and the colour, the paint. You compose the subject, the realistic subject, you make a fantastic shape. For example, here, this is some wood, this is a table with a top and wooden flowers, you know, therefore I paint a [flowery] table, for example.."

"..because I live in Paris, but just outside Paris at the start of Yonne, I have a barn, a very, very big barn.. ..right near Auxerre, a barn forty meters long, six meters wide and fifteen meters high, and I do all my work there.. it's like a large street, you know."

"..people always talk about painting, because basically painting does not talk."

"As I said, in the Fifties I had the 'angst' (= Dutch for 'fear') to survive materialistically. In the city Paris it was a battle. I painted with a knife and called the results 'human landscapes', abstract landscapes with human faces here and there. Today I can do without fight or struggle; every brushstroke now is ready, goes by itself: la peinture depouillé you could say. I discovered that in Picasso's late paintings. You look very closely but there is nothing anymore. He painted here and there a little bit; it is not finished, but once you step back you see a fantastic image, life by itself. I'm not fighting anymore; I'm floating, surfing on the wind."

"It's like this - you are in front of your canvas, you hand holds the paint, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white - but all the time it knows what it wants. So - what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when - with my hands holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms - I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life."

"The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth."

"..I believe, they always say to me that I'm an expressionist, I don't know why, because perhaps the technique is [not understood] and the colour is strong.. .But for some years, I work, I feel much more of, of the space, that is: magic is spacious if you like. Because for me man is an infinitely creative space. And because of that I am always looking to expand my work, you know, to find space."

"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."

"He is like an angel who floats for a little while on this planet and touches with his wings the canvas."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The Cobra group started new, and first of all we threw away all these things we had known and started afresh, like a child — fresh and new. Sometimes my works look very childish, or childlike, schizophrenic or stupid, you know. But that was the good thing for me. Because, for me, the material is the paint itself. The paint expresses itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go on to paint it."

"..at least fifty [gouaches painted in complete dark], one after another. Then I made a light, a candle, and I picked them up and turned them around, as I couldn't see a top or a bottom. I finished them off as I felt fit, a bit more white or a red spot [in his studio in Amsterdam, in 1947"

"Now we'll start the song of the wild man who lives on the mountain top, who does not want to be seen let us now start that song without words, without music, come on.. (let's not do anything for at least ten minutes) That's the spirit, there he comes, the song of the inner voice, the song of the primitive man"

"I'm able to paint so nice and thick with those big splodges that stay upright because I mix my own paint. I use the formula that the seventeenth-century painters used and I've added one or two things myself. A very important element is stand oil. I once got hold of a whole barrel full and I'm still using it. There are pots of it in all my studios, in New York, in Connecticut, in Monaco, and in Tuscany. [the oil had been found when an old paint shop closed down, in a] stock that had been there since the seventeenth century.. .I mix my oil paint with it, and I throw in a lot of eggs and some concentrated turpentine. It's as thick as homemade mayonnaise. When it dries it is as tough and hard as rubber."

"Of course, I painted before Cobra, as afterwards. Each one of us [CoBrA-artists] had his own personality. Cobra is only a very short period of my life. It was like a crossroads. We crossed paths and each continued on his way.. ..We [artists] are not born to form groups. A group that lasted for too long would destroy the creative activity of its members."

"My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast."

"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."

"I paint like a barbarian in this barbarous time."

"in Dutch: Ik schilder als een barbaar in deze barbaarse tijd."

"I have painted like an ape. The ape phase is in all my work. My first lick of paint is the ape phase, from that I grow towards a more intellectual phase, involving the lines, the rhythm. From that phase I grow towards mankind, for that is where the power of my imagination lies. It no longer has anything to do with reality, even though the world is present in it - for we recognize people, animals, plants, you name it."

"I don't paint, I hit."

"[Appel] is a classical painter who lives much less in the 'madding' crowd and far more in the quiet of his studios."

"[Appel's painting] 'Hip, Hip, Hourra!' (1949) is one of the finest works he produced in this period. The figures stand out from the black background surface.. ..in a lively movement and colouring I would go so far as to call sumptuous.. ..'Hip, Hip, Hourra!' is as flat as a kaleidoscope. It is a coloured drawing on black, a dark box with colours stuck on like butterflies in a glass case.. ..[Fuchs compares it with a slightly later painting 'Volons ensemble']: This work is definitely not a set of figures that have settled quietly in a painting; what we have is a confusion of more or less figurative movement: a composition without quietude. In 'Volons ensemble' Appel created in 1950 the model for a structure that would be fundamental for the rest of his oeuvre."

"My work is in a complete transformation. Lately, in my studio in Amsterdam, 'beings' re-emerge more and more, but I have repainted all the canvases that I have brought with me [from Amsterdam to Paris]. It is matter itself. On the canvas, no discovery, no personal drama, no submission to a rhythm.. ..freed from 'Victory Boogiewoogie' [title of the last work of Piet Mondrian, 1944], bepop, bepop, we free ourselves from rhythm, we are not there yet, but it is coming.. .Now I paint stains, bigger stains, colours endlessly reapplied one upon the other, I scrape and I put down new stains of colour unto nothing remains but one great plane, concentrated and linked at the same time, suddenly a vivid red or yellow and the canvas and being merge."

"The cross of the Cruxifixion — without the cross of the Resurrection is the symbol of a mutilated Christianity."

"They do not see what they look at, hence they know not what they do."

""Nothing burns in hell but ego" says Tauler. Does anything live but Buddha Nature, Christ Spirit?"

"Innumerable Buddhas Enlightened… innumerable Christs crucified… always the same Christ, the same Buddha!"

"Even if there had never been a Buddha nor a Christ CHRIST NATURE IS! BUDDHA NATURE IS!"

"the distance between this pigeon's brain and mine is minute compared to that between mine and Bodhi's Wisdom Compassion"

"the grasses whisper "This is my Body""