deKooning: "Door to the River" (1961)

“They say when you’re drowning, you suddenly see all your life, all the forgotten memories, in a fraction of a second.
Is it really possible to capture a whole life on the canvas of a painting? Just like that, with a few traces of paint?”
(from "La Belle Noiseuse", movie based on story by Balzac)
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“There’s a dimension that we don’t understand. In other words, if you have a landscape or an interior you have a space. You can deal with it in terms of images or what-not. But you can’t really understand what paint is doing. Paint is doing something you ask it to do in order to get the nose on somebody’s face. The paint also does something that isn’t the nose on the face. What it does is fascinating. It’s a new geography.”
-----------Willem deKooning (1904-1997)