Frank Stella Quotes

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

What you see is what you see.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

You see what you know!

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

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.

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

The aim of art is to create space.

I'm more of a house painter.That's the way I work.

There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there

I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.

Any artist can't get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you're only interested in what you're doing right now.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

You couldn't forget Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.

Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.

I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do. I couldn't forget Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, I mean that was the basis.

Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

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.

Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.

What you see is what you see

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there.

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.