Early Life and Education
She was born Elaine Marie Catherine Fried in 1918 (she later gave her birth year as 1920) in Brooklyn, New York. The oldest of four children born to Charles Frank Fried and Mary Ellen O'Brien Fried, she was raised in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. Her artistic sensibility was encouraged by her mother, who took her to museums and taught her to draw what she saw. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, then brief studies at Hunter College in New York City, in 1937 she attended the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1938 she went on to study at the American Artists School in New York City.
She stated:
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Read more about this topic: Elaine De Kooning
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“If factory-labor is not a means of education to the operative of to-day, it is because the employer does not do his duty. It is because he treats his work-people like machines, and forgets that they are struggling, hoping, despairing human beings.”
—Harriet H. Robinson (1825–1911)