Bill [Willem de Kooning] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August' [he painted in 1946].

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Bill [Willem de Kooning] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August' [he painted in 1946]." in the context of "In: an tape-recorded interview with Elaine de Kooning on August 27, 1981; conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral Histories." to mean that wisdom is timeless.