Frank Stella Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

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

  Frank Stella

  Stress, Important, Looks

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

  Frank Stella

  Cutting, Sculpture, Painting

• Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings

  Frank Stella

  Artist, Doctors, Views

• 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... What you see is what you see.

  Frank Stella

  People, Want, Facts

  "Questions to Stella and Judd". Interview with Bruce Glaser, www.artnews.com. September 1966.

• 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.

  Frank Stella

  Wall, Artist, Abstract Painting

  "With Frank Stella, what you see is what you see. But when the modern master speaks, what you hear may raise your eyebrows."by Kenneth Baker, www.sfgate.com. June 17, 2004.

• As far as I was concerned, with the early paintings, I liked them, I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't think it was the end of the world. I also thought of it as a kind of structure, a base to build on. So this proves I can do this and that, and they don't collapse, so then what can I do from here? How can I build on it?

  Frank Stella

  Thinking, World, Painting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings. Keep my mouth shut. You'll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again, people will always tell you about it. Even if you were the source of what's wrong with it.

  Frank Stella

  People, Say Anything, Mouths

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Ideas, Confusion, Want

  Frank Stella, Robert Carleton Hobbs, Singapore Tyler Print Institute (2002). “Frank Stella in 2002”

• I never noticed competing with other generations. There's competition within your own generation, but that competition is good. Maybe you're annoyed that somebody's getting more money than you are, but what's really annoying is if someone's painting a better painting than you're making. So it's something to think about and work toward and stay focused on.

  Frank Stella

  Thinking, Annoyed, Competition

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Frank Stella

  Imitating Others, Painting, Imitation

• You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

  Frank Stella

  Portraits, Bars, Landscape

  Source: www.wbur.org

• 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.

  Frank Stella

  Art, Illustration, Space

  Frank Stella (1986). “Working Space”, p.5, Harvard University Press

• 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.

  Frank Stella

  Differences, Black, Painting

  Source: www.wbur.org

• When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

  Frank Stella

  Technique, Meat, Thrill

  Stephanie Rosenthal, Ad Reinhardt, Haus der Kunst München, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (2006). “Black paintings”

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

  Frank Stella

  Real, Abstract Painting, Century

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