Sculptors

"The body trained to deal with worries and with itself falls apart. A contradictory body rises from it, a will to see shows itself what can only be seen at night. Who sees then? Through the sacrificed body Black sees itself red, it listens to its vibrating tones, which the day never hears. The magnetic hand and shoulder hastily throws illuminations on the canvas. At this instant of gesture, the unknown storms, and the body breaks apart."

"It is painting and sculpture [of Karel Appel] at its best. It is close to the heart, animalistic, idealistic, and thoroughly experimental."

"But Appel is more an assembler than a sculptor. Although now and then he carves wood or models plaster his works are mainly assemblages. He recycles objets trouvés which appeal to him in some way or which invite reuse. An increasingly wide range of industrial leftovers is incorporated in the assemblages from the early Nineties."

"The painter is the first dancer of his work. Appel understands the appeal to disturb the finished work as he is in the process of making it. He drops his canvas, his paper, puts down his brush – that is to say, he resigns himself to the deposition of the gesture, as one gives in to fatigue by taking a break. He will soon begin performing again.."

"Occasion is a good word: it speaks of an 'offered case'. The painter also lives on such plundering. Karel Appel is touched by a circumstance, and make paintings out of his feeling. Appel's work touches in turn those that encounter it, and they leap at the occasion to reflect on it. Art and thinking live on these, jostling."

"My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesque in life. An art that can always be directly present to us when life is at its most real.. [ on the same day he noted:] ..Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia England France against Germany. We agreed that it would be no bad thing for our rather demoralized present-day civilization if everyone's instincts and drives were to be harnessed to one cause.."

"..Appel does not hesitate to expose his colour to rubbish. More than any other this work returns 'aesthetic discourse to its precariousness: how could it articulate coloured things that so clearly result from a 'gesture' and are free from any finality. It is not the gesture of the painter, it is the gesture of painting, or painting as gesture that Appel opposes to thought."

"The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings. [arguing with Franz Marc who demanded in 'Der Blaue Reiter' circa 1912 a new modern art, in relation to its own - changing - time]."

"Oh I wish that I could paint again. Paint is an instrument without which I cannot survive for any length of time. Whenever I even think of gray, green and white, I am overcome with quivers of lust. Then I wish that this war would end and that I might paint again."

"I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradation and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture"

"[it is] amusing all the same, how the peacetime life we cursed and groaned about now elevates itself with iron logic to the status of paradise.."

"Now you know what red does: / Red likes to walk in the green grass. / You now know what yellow knows: / The sun shines because no one's fond on dying. / As for blue: the blue sky seems black / to the kid who welcomes nothing."

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

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

"Violence allows Appel to lose 'nothing' of the 'whole'; to stop his painting only after all the leaps of the act have crossed it."

"[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."

"Karel Appel had been deeply interested in the paintings and drawings of the mentally ill since his discovery of Dubuffet's Art brut. As he explained years later, he had had access to this type of work in Holland, Belgium and Paris. However, it was the 1950 exhibition [September 1950, exhibition of Art, inaugurated at the Centre Psychiatrique Sainte-Anne, Paris] that opened his eyes definitively and enabled him to shake off European classicism.. .[But] what I want to point up here is that, although the Sainte-Anne exhibition was crucial for his understanding of such paintings, he had already made his own excursions into 'psychopathological art'[before]."

"..by adding and more adding, you soon get such an accumulation of colour material that the painting eventually acquires a heavy, febrile surface. The danger is of such a thick, abundant, heavy surface seeming dull and sluggish to the eye, because in that case it would lose the mobility, which, for Appel, is the essential quality of all surfaces. Painting blinds painting, like mud and clay blocks a pool. A painting's entire choreography, caught in tension, can collapse in an instant. And it's in that instant when Appel the draughtsman gets to work, and the open play of the lines of the drawing is the right medium to blow new life into the painting."

"[Appel's paintings] assert themselves with a certain brutality that leaves little room for doubt.. .Appel exists.. .Appel's paintings exist, they are made of colour-paste. His painting is absolutely materialist."

"The mill is a tool for the wind the mill is like a human being that escapes"

"('My three year old daughter can do as much'.) Yes, it is true, but the difference is that I do it."

"The brushstroke, in painting, is purely and simply what it is – rhythm, color, matter."

"The only control that I excercize [in painting] is to not throw too much paint next to the canvas."

"In poetic creation there is no question of overcoming matter, as the idle aesthetic proclaimed by so many people would have it – but to free matter."

"If I had not become a painter, I would surely have become a clown.. .. because I make people laugh.. ..Faces deformed by suffering, humour or work. Often crazy. They then became imaginary, when I adorned them with movements free colours depending on the head. The colour too become clown-like"

"[Karel Appel called out to 'his Night':] You, Beauty! And since I have to account for a body, I have handed this torture over to the executioner"

"Pollock.. .I also feel like an erupting volcano."

"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]"

"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."

"If the stroke of the brush is so important, it is because it expresses precisely what is not there."

"It is a question of expressing, at base, the essence of the tree.. .What does not appear in what does appear, in short. What remains hidden, concealed, withdraws into what appears."

"I am afraid of a new barbarism which is killing man's freedom."

"Born in a district of Amsterdam, from his youth the artist [Appel] came into contact, according to Peter Bellew, with the sculpture of Dutch New Guinea, a good example of which is to be found in the collection of the Colonial Museum (today the Tropenmuseum) [300 meters from his parental house]. Appel himself told Simon Vinkenoog that all his work was popular, in that it came from the people, adding that it wasn't "folk" popular, but more the kind of popular found in an industrial, incipiently consumerist society, with high waste levels, like the Amsterdam of his youth, a popularity from which neither violence nor a certain degree of chaos are exempt."

"The true artist has no style. Style is an exterior decorative element. The true artist as servant of his matter, transcends it with an absolute freedom."

"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."

"All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same.. .Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today."

"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."

"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"

"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."

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

"Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"A war is raging within me that burns everything. So I can begin again."

"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."