Frank Stella Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.

Frank Stella
I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at all. The painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there, became more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory. Until finally it became obvious that there had to be a better way.

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

Frank Stella
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.

Frank Stella
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 good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.

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
When 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.

Frank Stella
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.

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

Frank Stella
You are always related [as an artist] to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can't think of anything I like less.... the 'Groupe de recherché d'Art visuel' actually painted all the patterns before I did – all the basic designs that are in my painting – I didn't even know about it.... it still doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting – sort of post Ma Bill school – a kind of curiosity, very dreary.

Frank Stella
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.

Frank Stella
I always get into arguments, with people who want to retain the old values in painting — the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object..

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
One could stand in front of any Abstract-Expressionist work for a long time, and walk back and forth, and inspect the depths of the pigment and the inflection and all the painterly brushwork for hours. But I wouldn't particularly want to do that and also I wouldn't ask anyone to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I would like to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That's why I make the paintings the way they are, more or less.

Frank Stella
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.

Frank Stella
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.

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
When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

Frank Stella
I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting. After looking comes imitating. In my own case it was at first largely a technical immersion. How did Kline put down that color? Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on.

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

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

Frank Stella
My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's doing. He is making a thing.... all I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion... What you see is what you see.

Frank Stella
The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.

Frank Stella
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.

Frank Stella
I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.

Frank Stella
The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!

Frank Stella
[reacting in the artist-talk on Donald Judd who emphasis the 'whole' of an art work] But we're still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Judd does] you have to organize the structure. I don't think our work that radical in any sense because you don't find any really new compositional or structural element. I don't know if that exists. It's like the idea of the color you haven't seen before. Does something exist that's as radical as a diagonal that's not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can't describe?

Frank Stella