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Frank Stella Quotes
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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
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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.
Frank Stella
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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
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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.
Frank Stella
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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
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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
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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.
Frank Stella
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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
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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
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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
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I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity.
Frank Stella
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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.
Frank Stella
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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
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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
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If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.
Frank Stella
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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.
Frank Stella
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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
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I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.
Frank Stella
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The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.
Frank Stella
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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
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When people still talk about art that I made in the 60s— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!
Frank Stella
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If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about.
Frank Stella
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The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.
Frank Stella
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The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.
Frank Stella
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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 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
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Quote of the day
No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.
Sydney Smith
Frank Stella
Born:
May 12, 1936
(age 86)
Bio:
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York.
Known for:
Harran II (1967)
Die Fahne Hoch! (1959)
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II (1959)
Jasper's Dilemma (1972)
Shoubeegi (1978)
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