Frank Stella - Object Quotes

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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
[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 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
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