Elaine de Kooning was born in
Brooklyn. She studied at the Leonardo Da Vinci art school in New York City as
well as the American Artists School and Black Mountain College. She was
inspired by her teachers, Stuart Davis and Raphael Soyer, as well as her husband,
who gave her drawing lessons and sold her first watercolor. She experimented
with painting, etching and sculpture, and her work is a mixture of abstraction
and realism, giving the art a very unique, raw feel. She loved to travel, which
greatly inspired her artwork. She tended to draw on one particular theme for a
long period of time, for example, her most prominent themes included a bull
inspired by a trip to the Southwest, a statue from the Luxembourg gardens in
Paris, and wildlife cave drawings from France and Spain. De Kooning also had a
strong political voice, becoming a member of the Young Communist League at the
American Artists School and the John Reed Club. Elaine and her husband Willem
de Kooning both suffered from alcoholism, a struggle for which Elaine
undoubtedly found an outlet in her artwork.
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