Kenneth Noland: Quotes about painting

“Value differences in painting always cut in; color differences always go side by side. Laterally. Color differences can illustrate three dimensional form, but using color in terms of hue belongs more properly to painting than modelling with dark and light [as in sculpting] does.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 22
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Color , Light , Painting

“Tony Cairo [English abstract sculptor] and I tried to collaborate at several points and it hasn't been successful. As a matter of fact, recently Tony has made sculpture that I have painted. He has to make the sculpture before I can paint it. That means that the form is taking precedence – that the material takes precedence as a form, rather than color establishing the form. It's not going to well but I'm working on it. There's something about color that is so abstract that it is difficult for it to function in conjunction with solid form... Color has properties of weight, density, transparency, and so forth. And when it also has to be compatible with things that have an actual density, a given form, it's very difficult.”

Kenneth Noland

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Color , Success , Painting

“Artists are mechanics who work with their hands, making things. Artists are involved with the means of creativity, the nature of skills, the revelation of making. Art comes from the work, I see a painting as an expressive entity. There's no picture that I know of where the subject carries as much expressive possibility as the actual execution of the picture.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 9
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Art , Nature , Painting

“These things [cutting, cropping and shaping] always happen in strange ways. You can say after the fact what you're doing, but, believe me, you can't project it ahead. It has to be worked through before you can recognize what it was that you were looking for. It's a search; it's not like getting a brainstorm... It's work, yes; it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.”

Kenneth Noland

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art , Way , Search , Painting

“Morris Louis and I were interested in how Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler [famous for her soak-painting technique] were using paint. Of necessity we had to get more interested in the stuff of painting. We talked a lot about whether to size the painting or not to size, how to mix up paint.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 14
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Painting

“I believe that there are varying points of contact. You have to be able to see the whole thing first. All great paintings are sculptures – there's so much of the factualness about it that a great painting forces you into a visual, physical movement of yourself. That's what determines the way you experience a painting kinetically. You move closer, you sight down it, you till your head, you step back, you feel as though you are in it. That being in it is just as important as looking from a distance.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 10
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Way , Feeling , Painting

“Picasso loved depicting. He didn't love painting. It's always more like filling in for Picasso. But you can see that Matisse loved the stuff. He loved making it thin, loved moving it around.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 14
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Love , Painting

“When you look at a great painting it's like a conversation. It has questions for you. It raises questions in you... Being an artist is about discovering things after you've done them. Like Cézanne – after twenty years of that mountain [Mont St. Victoire] he found out what he was doing. If it isn't a process of discovery, it shows. I'm in it for the long haul.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 24
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Mountain , Question , Painting

“I have to work things out by painting them. I can't just imagine what will happen. I have to do it and see it. That's the only way I find out if it will go anywhere.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 9
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Way , Imagination , Painting

“But there was something else that the Abstract Expressionists taught us: they began to use something besides the conventional means of art; to want other kinds of paint, or kinds of canvas, or ways of making pictures that weren't the usual ways. Some of the next generation, the Pop Art artists [like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, picked up this attitude and began to put actual things into art. We [=w:Morris Louis and Noland] were making abstract art, but we wanted to simplify the selection of materials, and to use them in a very economical way. To get to raw canvas, to use the canvas un-stretched – to use it in more basic or fundamental ways, to use it as fabric rather than as a stretched surface.”

Kenneth Noland

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art , Way , Painting

“[the 'Surfboards' - series works Noland made mid-70's] were almost like cut-out figures without being figurative… I think of them, in some way, as being like figures; they remind me of figures in vertical Cubist paintings. Even the small pictures have that kind of human proportion in the rectangles. It's not exactly a reference, but the relation of length to width in the rectangles is like a person.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, pp. 23-24
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Way , Thinking , Painting , Personality

“It turns out that certain picture shapes don't allow you to use different kinds of quantity distributions of color for different expressions. The quantities and configurations of colors are as important as the colors themselves. When I first started painting circles, I went fairly quickly to a 6-foot square module. I think de Kooning said in an interview or artist's discussion that he only wanted to make gestures as big as his arm could reach. It struck me that he was saying this physical size had to do with the expressive size of the pictures he wanted to make. And as far as I know, when I got to the 6-foot square size, it was right in terms of myself and wasn't too much of a field. Or it was a field, yet it was still physical. And that's why I used it for so long.”

Kenneth Noland

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Color , Thinking , Painting

“Until Abstract Expressionism you had to have something to paint about, some kind of subject matter. Even though Kandinsky and w:Arthur Dove were improvising earlier, it didn't take. They had to have symbols, suggested natural images or geometry, which was something real structurally. That gave them something to paint about. What was new was the idea that something you looked at could be like something you heard.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 8
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Idea , Nature , Painting

“Abstract Expressionism – especially Pollock, not the more academic painters like De Kooning – made the threshold between illusion and the stuff of painting lower, the distance between them closer. Pollock made all things about the picture, all the stuff, actual. Taking the canvas off the stretcher, putting it on the floor, made it more real. Mixing up different kinds of paint, getting it to stain in, was getting at a kind of materiality.”

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, p. 14
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Painting