Top 15 Karel Appel Quotes

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

Theories / are things.. .Absence and nonexistence / of theories are things.