Karel Appel Quotes

Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet (1921-2006)

Karel Appel (April 25, 1921 – May 3, 2006) was a Dutch painter and sculptor. He was one of the early founders of the European avantgarde movement COBRA in 1948. Later Appel lived and worked in Paris and in the U.S. His painting art is mainly colorful and gestural.

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Pen Names: Apel, Karel • Appel, Christiaan Karel

Alternative Names: Appel Karel • Christiaan Karel Appel • C. K. Appel • Karel Apel • Christaan Karel Appel • C.K. Appel • K. Appel

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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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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..

..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.

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.

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.

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

quote circa 1958; from the movie 'De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel', Jan Vrijman; as quoted in De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN Nijmegen, 1998

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.