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 freed… - Karel Appel

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

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.