Ellsworth Kelly Quotes
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I'm not an Expressionist. I love to look at de Kooning, but I've got this kind of secret life, and that is something that pleases me. I have to try and make something out of it.
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Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.'
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Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
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Like the postcard collages, the colors are shapes in a landscape. In this case his collage 'Napoleon at Würtsburg' it is a painting of a landscape, not a photo as in the postcards collages, and therefore a contrast of the traditional painting and a presentation of literal space on top of depicted space.
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I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.
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Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.
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Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.
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When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.
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I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'
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One of the first drawings I did in Paris - I wasn't thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing - I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring.
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I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.
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When I was a child, I spent all my spare time looking at birds and insects (beetles). My color use, and the object quality of the 'painting', and the use of fragmentation is closer to birds and beetles and fish, than it is to De Stijl or the Constructivists.
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I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
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All my work begins with drawings.
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I made the photographs just like I draw.. .I wanted the photographs Kelly made circa 1950 in Paris to be enlightening to my art..
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The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.
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All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked (the) object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting.
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My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes - I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them.
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I'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning everything.
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I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.
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I've always wanted... I wanted to give people joy.
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My work is about structure. It has never been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. I saw the Abstract Expressionists for the first time in 1954. My line of influence has been the 'structure' of the things I liked: French Romanesque architecture, Byzantine, Egyptian and Oriental art, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Klee, Picasso, Beckman..
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I don't like acrylic because you can't get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint, the surface gets better and richer.
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My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual.