Frank Stella: Quotes about painting

“The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.”

Frank Stella

Quotes, 1971 - 2000
Source: Machine in the Studio, Caroline. A. Jones, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 197-198

Change , Painting

“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

Quotes, 1960 - 1970
Source: LIFE http://books.google.com/books?id=XUoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA49, Vol. 64, nr. 3, 19 January 1968, p. 49

People , Painting

“One could stand in front of any Abstract-Expressionist work for a long time, and walk back and forth, and inspect the depths of the pigment and the inflection and all the painterly brushwork for hours. But I wouldn't particularly want to do that and also I wouldn't ask anyone to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I would like to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That's why I make the paintings the way they are, more or less.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 122

Way , Time , Painting

“There's always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or surrealism, there's going to be someone who's not painting complicated paintings, someone who's trying to simplify…”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 117

Way , Painting

“I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas... I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 121

Painting

“There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painters technique and tools.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 114

Color , Question , Problem , Parting

“Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 120

School , Art , Way , Drawing

“The thing that struck me most was the way he stuck to the motif [in the 'Flag' and 'Target' paintings by Jasper Johns ]…. the idea of stripes – the rhythm and the interval – the idea of repetition. I began to think a lot about repetition.”

Frank Stella

quote, 1960's
Quotes, 1960 - 1970
Source: The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, pp. 215-216

Way , Quotes , Idea , Thinking

“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 120

Way , Painting , Housing

“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

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 113

Color , Way , Painting

“Only what can be seen there [in the painting] is there... What you see is what you see.”

Frank Stella

Stella's quote 1964, in an interview; as quoted in: Harold Rosenberg (1972) The Re-Definition of Art. p. 125
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Painting

“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

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 113

Problem , Learning , Painting

“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

Quote from an interview, 1966; as quoted in Minimal Art, a Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, University of California Press, Berkeley 1968, p. 157-161
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Failure , Painting

“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

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 117

School , Motivation , Thinking , Painting

“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

Quoted in: Alan D. Bryce (2007) Art Smart: Art Smart: The Intelligent Guide to Investing in the Canadian Art Market. p. 55
Quotes, 1971 - 2000

Art , Painting

“If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about [after Reinhardt's death in 1967].”

Frank Stella

Quote of 1967; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Death , Painting

“People say that the paintings are always big because they're striving for effect, but they're also big so that I don't trip over myself, so that I have room to work, and people can come in and be comfortable.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 29.

People , Painting

“Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 118

Art , Way , Painting

“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

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 118

Way , Nature , Painting

“The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 28.

Learning , Painting