“I don't think of my work as calligraphic. Critics also describe Jackson and De Kooning as calligraphic painters but calligraphy has nothing to do with us. It's interesting that the Oriental critics never say this. The Oriental idea of space is an infinite space; it is not painted space, and ours is. In the first place, calligraphy is writing and I am not writing. People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.”

—  Franz Kline

Quote, (1958)
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

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Franz Kline 20
American painter 1910–1962

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“People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1950's, Conversations With Artists, 1957

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“When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn't want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White 1952. It's the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

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Source: 'Colour Chart I', interview with Christoph Grunenberg, 1 May 2009; 'Sixty years at full intensity', Tate 2009

“After doing the imaginary landscapes until say 1956, in ’57 I came out with the first Burst painting… There was a different type of space than I had ever used and it was a further clarification of what I was trying to do. The thing that was interesting that it was a return to a focal point, but it was a focal point with the kind of space that existed in traditional painting. Because this was like a solitary image or two images that were just floating in the canvas space. They had to hold the space and they also had to create all the movement – that took place within the rectangle.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

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Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

It's phony reverence. It's ridiculous.
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“By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place... In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

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“When I was young I was more obsessed with the materiality of things.... today I am more interested in air and atmosphere. This is why I deliberately treat space ambivalently. For example, an orange painting with white lines might be viewed as an orange wall with white lines, but the orange colour is no less atmospheric for all of that. It abounds white light, and the white line vibrate in a deep space, too, as well as an orange 'wall.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

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“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 (1928–2011) American artist

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Willem de Kooning photo

“Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 45.
1960's

“There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I'm not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don't decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me. It's not symbolism any more than it's calligraphy. I'm not painting bridge constructions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets.... I don't paint a given object – a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting.... it's not these things that get me started on a painting.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

“Bill [=Willem de Kooning ] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

he painted in 1946
1972 - 1989
Source: an tape-recorded interview with Elaine de Kooning on August 27, 1981 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-elaine-de-kooning-11999; conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral Histories.

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