Helen Frankenthaler Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted [as in her painting 'Chairman of the Board', 1971].... That 'negative' space has just as active a role as the 'positive' painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.

Helen Frankenthaler
I'd rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.

Helen Frankenthaler
I wonder if my pictures are more "lyrical" (that loaded word!) because I'm a woman. Looking at my paintings as if they were painted by a woman is superficial, a side issue.

Helen Frankenthaler
There is no 'always'. No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.

Helen Frankenthaler
When I look at what I have pinned up on my studio wall — torn-out reproductions, catalogs or little flyers — the originals are all on canvas, whether it's Titian, Vuillard or Whistler.

Helen Frankenthaler
I had no desire to copy Pollock. I didn't want to take a stick and dip it in a can of enamel [paint]. I needed something more liquid, watery, thinner. All my life, I have been drawn to water and translucency. I love the water; I love to swim, to watch changing seascapes. One of my favorite childhood games was to fill a sink with water and punt nail polish into to see what happened when the colors burst up the surface, merging into each other as floating, changing shapes.

Helen Frankenthaler
Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

Helen Frankenthaler
I still, when I judge my own pictures (either while I'm working or after I think it's finished) determine if they work in a certain kind of space through shape or color. I think all totally abstract pictures – the best ones that really come off – Newman, Pollock, [Kenneth] Noland – have tremendous space; perspective space despite the emphasis on flat surface. For example, in Noland a band of yellow in relation to a band of blue and one of orange can move in depth although they are married to the surface. This has become a familiar explanation, but few people really see and feel it that way.... in my work, because of color and shape a lot is read in the landscape sense..

Helen Frankenthaler
With any picture, on paper or on canvas, the main idea is: does it work? Is it beautiful? People seem to feel that canvas is more 'serious' than paper, more desirable.

Helen Frankenthaler
I used to be much more shy of the word 'landscape' applied to my work. I mind that less now.

Helen Frankenthaler
I painted 'Mountains and Sea' [in 1952] after seeing the cliffs of Nova Scotia. It's a hilly landscape with wild surf rolling against the rocks. Though it was painted in a windowless loft, the memory of the landscape is in the painting, but it has also equal amounts of Cubism, Pollock, Kandinsky, Gorky.

Helen Frankenthaler
I always say to [my assistants] when we start a job, 'I might need you desperately to bring me a sponge or a brush. But at the same time, I don't want to know you're in the room.' It sounds rude, but it's meant lovingly.

Helen Frankenthaler
Sometimes I think the worst thing is the current 'worldliness' of the whole [art] scene. It is the most deceptive, corrupting, transient thing, full of kicks and fun but so little to do with what it's all really about.... It has to do with our time, a desperate pact about the power of immediate-in-ness. But I feel less and less concerned with this as an issue. So what? No threat.

Helen Frankenthaler
On Pollock's 'Black and White' paintings:
It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country but didn't know the language, but had read enough and had a passionate interest, and was eager to live there, I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the language.

Helen Frankenthaler
..[from Pollock she took over] the concern with line, fluid line, calligraphy, and.... experiments with line not as line but as shape.

Helen Frankenthaler
I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

Helen Frankenthaler
The picture developed – bit by bit while I was working on it – into shapes symbolic of an exuberant figure and ladder.... therefore: 'Jacob's Ladder' [the title of the painting she made in 1966].
On the birth of a title of the art-work 'Jacob's Ladder'

Helen Frankenthaler
I was already working on large pieces of paper, and I wanted to try going to canvas.

Helen Frankenthaler
Now I work on waist-high enormous tabletops. I no longer stoop to conquer.

Helen Frankenthaler
A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it as well - she did this and then she did that; there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.

Helen Frankenthaler
I can look out this window and see how this view changes minute to minute. On certain days, the horizon line disappears completely, and you get this glow of pink and gray. The sky seems to fall into the water.

Helen Frankenthaler
After the first day there [In 1961, at the invitation of Tatyana Grosman, Frankenthaler ventured out to Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Grosman's Long Island printmaking studio, and began making lithographs for the first time] I felt no hesitation. I was very committed. All I had to do was start work on that print. It was a whole new road - and a very connected road.

Helen Frankenthaler
I think today 'beautiful', which is always a tricky word, but now it's become an incendiary word, because in many ways today beauty is obsolete and not the main concern of art. And you can't prove beauty, it's there as a fact.... and you know it, and you feel it, and it's real. But you can't say to somebody.. this has it. I might be able to say it and others might recognize it. But it gives no specific message, other than itself, which in turn should be able to move you in to some sort of truth and insight, and something beyond art. I mean initially it's pleasure that grows. But it isn't just the shock of a message that you can have and dismiss. Once you've had it, it's over.

Helen Frankenthaler
When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is... It is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal, Signature....'Gesture' must appear out of necessity, not habit.

Helen Frankenthaler
It [the Mauve-district in the U.S.] relates to a theme which appears on-and-off, of pictures that often have one central vast shape, district, or territory; in this case, the shape itself [a square] is a play on the very shape of the canvas (quote in 1969).

Helen Frankenthaler