Frank Stella - Find Quotes

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[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
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
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
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 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
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