Frank Stella quotes - page 2

Frank Stella is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, widely recognized as a leading figure in postwar American art. His minimalist and abstract works broke with traditional painting, emphasizing geometric forms and vibrant color. He continues to influence generations of artists with his innovative approaches to art and design. Here are 51 of his quotes:

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. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.

Frank Stella

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].

Frank Stella

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.

Frank Stella

If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.

Frank Stella

Time is what you have left.... you just march with it and use it the best you can.

Frank Stella

I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.

Frank Stella

I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas... I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.

Frank Stella

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...

Frank Stella

There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painters technique and tools.

Frank Stella

I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity.

Frank Stella

There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.

Frank Stella

We believe that we can find the end, and that a painting can be finished. The Abstract Expressionists always felt the painting's being finished was very problematical. We'd more readily say that our paintings were finished and say, well, it's either a failure or it's not, instead of saying, well, maybe it's not really finished.

Frank Stella

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.

Frank Stella

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there.

Frank Stella

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.

Frank Stella

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.

Frank Stella

Only what can be seen there [in the painting] is there.. .What you see is what you see.

Frank Stella

Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important.

Frank Stella

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.

Frank Stella

The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.

Frank Stella

They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work.

Frank Stella

Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

Frank Stella