Frank Stella Quotes
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Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings.
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I know what I want, but it's physically beyond me now. I can work on what I can handle. It's a playoff between the object and my physical limits.
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I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you.
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Ken Noland would use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle of the painting because it's the easiest way to get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of the canvas. If you're that much involved with the surface of anything, you're bound to find symmetry the most natural means.
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If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.
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If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about after Reinhardt's death in 1967.
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There's always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or surrealism, there's going to be someone who's not painting complicated paintings, someone who's trying to simplify...
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I hate to say this. ..it's made to order. Then, I disorder it a little bit or, I should say, I reorder it. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to claim that I had the ability to disorder it. I wish I did.
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Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.
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I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.
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The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.
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I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.
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They are more complex to begin with, but their organization, the way they end up being put together, isn't that different. You can't shake your own sensibility. No matter what the concept is; the artist's eye decides when it's right.. ..which is a notion of sensibility.
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No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.
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Time is what you have left.. ..you just march with it and use it the best you can.
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But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
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People say that the paintings are always big because they're striving for effect, but they're also big so that I don't trip over myself, so that I have room to work, and people can come in and be comfortable.
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I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.
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The thing that struck me most was the way he stuck to the motif in the 'Flag' and 'Target' paintings by Jasper Johns .. ..the idea of stripes – the rhythm and the interval – the idea of repetition. I began to think a lot about repetition. quote, 1960's
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I wanted something that was direct – right to you eye .. ..something you didn't have to look around – you got the whole thing right away.
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Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a
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What you see is what you see.
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When Morris Louis|Morris Louis showed in 1958, everybody like in 'Art News', by Tom Hess dismissed his work as thin, merely decorative. They still do. Louis is the really interesting case.. .In every sense his instincts were Abstract Expressionist, and he was terribly involved with all of that, but he felt he had to move, too.
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A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.