Ellsworth Kelly Quotes
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All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.
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I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.
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This book full of linoleum prints will be an alphabet of pictorial elements without text, which shall aim at establishing a larger scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, and a new spirit of art accompanying architecture.
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I was taught to draw very well when I was in school at Boston. And I grew to enjoy drawing so much that I never stopped.
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I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.
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My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.
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I have a sort of inner sense for scale.
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Time has always been very important in my work.
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The form of my painting is the content.
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My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.
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I like silence.
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In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'
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Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.
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Each drawing that I've done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw.
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Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I've done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.
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My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.
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Simple, I don't like the word simple. I like easy better. I want to forget about the technique. I sweat and worry but I don't want it look like that; but you can’t separate the artist and his technique.
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I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess.
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I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.
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I felt that everything is beautiful, but not? that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.
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All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.
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The three horizontal bands at the top in his collage: landscape with paintings 1954 correspond to sea, sand and sky, while the yellow/white and red/white shapes at the bottom are the paintings – though of a kind I actually painted only later. It was the collage that suggested the idea of doing such paintings.
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I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that - maybe that's possible.
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In my painting, negative space is never arbitrary. (I believe lithographs to be colored marks printed on a ground – the paper and the measure of the ground and the marks are to be considered of equal importance). In my painting, the painting is the subject rather than the subject the painting.