Frank Stella Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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
If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about.

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

Frank Stella
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
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
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
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
On a question about 'gesture' panting:
I think I had been badly affected by.... the romance of Abstract Expressionism... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like 'Art News' and 'Arts', which I read religiously.. I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux.

Frank Stella
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