Frank Stella Quotes (15 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

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


    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.


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

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

    Remember that the '60s was up against the best American art that anyone had produced, and probably the best international art of the 20th century, minus Picasso and Matisse. But who was going to be as good as Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still Maybe we weren't, but there was a lot of variety and a lot of trying.

    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.

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

    I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting - the humanistic values that they... 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 get.

    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.

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

    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.

    No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.


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