Frank Stella Quotes

#1. Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.

Frank Stella

#2. The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

Frank Stella

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

Frank Stella

#4. Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.

Frank Stella

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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.

Frank Stella

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

Frank Stella

#9. The strong is not the one who is physically powerful, but indeed, the one who controls himself when angry.

Muhammad

#10. 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

#11. Any artist can't get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you're only interested in what you're doing right now.

Frank Stella

#12. You couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.

Frank Stella

#13. I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.

Frank Stella

#14. If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.

Lewis Black

#15. You see what you know!

Frank Stella

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. It's hard to say that my twenties were the most miserable time in my life or that my first wife drove me crazy or that I hated the job that I had. You can say all of those things. But for the most part, people manage to have a good time when they're that age.

Frank Stella

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

Frank Stella

#20. 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

#21. We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.

T. Greenwood

#22. What you see is what you see

Frank Stella

#23. I'm more of a house painter.That's the way I work.

Frank Stella

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

Frank Stella

#25. 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

#26. When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong.

Mahalia Jackson

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

Frank Stella

#28. You know the Singaporean. He is a hard-working, industrious, rugged individual. Or we would not have made the grade. But let us also recognise that he is a champion grumbler.

Mr. Lee

#29. Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

Frank Stella

#30. The aim of art is to create space.

Frank Stella

#31. I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do. I couldn't forget [Wassily] Kandinsky and [Kazimir] Malevich and [Piet] Mondrian, I mean that was the basis.

Frank Stella

#32. 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.

Frank Stella

#33. 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.

Frank Stella