Frank Stella Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Frank Stella's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Painter Frank Stella's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 36 quotes on this page collected since May 12, 1936! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Frank Stella: Art Painting more...
  • 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.

    Integrity   Mean   Artist  
    Source: www.wbur.org
  • Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

  • The aim of art is to create space.

    Frank Stella (1986). “Working Space”, p.5, Harvard University Press
  • 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... What you see is what you see.

    People   Want   Facts  
    "Questions to Stella and Judd". Interview with Bruce Glaser, www.artnews.com. September 1966.
  • 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.

    Forget   Matisse   Be You  
    Source: www.wbur.org
  • One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

  • Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.

    Simple   Impact   Curves  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • 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.

    Badass   Real   Bad Ass  
    Frank Stella, Bonnie Clearwater (2000). “Frank Stella at 2000”, Museum of Contemporary Art
  • 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.

    Jobs   Crazy   People  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

    Source: www.wbur.org
  • I'm more of a house painter.That's the way I work.

    House   Way   Painter  
    Source: www.wbur.org
  • What you see is what you see.

    Stephanie Rosenthal, Ad Reinhardt, Haus der Kunst München, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (2006). “Black paintings”
  • 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.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • You see what you know!

    Art   Knows  
  • 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.

    "With Frank Stella, what you see is what you see. But when the modern master speaks, what you hear may raise your eyebrows."by Kenneth Baker, www.sfgate.com. June 17, 2004.
  • 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.

    Source: www.wbur.org
  • As far as I was concerned, with the early paintings, I liked them, I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't think it was the end of the world. I also thought of it as a kind of structure, a base to build on. So this proves I can do this and that, and they don't collapse, so then what can I do from here? How can I build on it?

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • I think for a lot of artists, if you're lucky enough to have a kind of career, especially toward the end, you start to think about what the whole ensemble looks like. It's the whole that counts. The parts are given, but you don't know how the whole thing's going to look when it's all put together.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • 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.

    Art   Eye   Hands  
  • A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

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

  • 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.

    Source: www.wbur.org
  • I never noticed competing with other generations. There's competition within your own generation, but that competition is good. Maybe you're annoyed that somebody's getting more money than you are, but what's really annoying is if someone's painting a better painting than you're making. So it's something to think about and work toward and stay focused on.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • 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.

    Mean   Way   Forget  
    Source: www.wbur.org
  • 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.

    Art   Fall   Complicated  
  • 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.

    Art   Goes On   World  
    Interview with Saul Ostrow, bombmagazine.org. April 01, 2000.
  • 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.

    Artist   World   Want  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • 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.

    Source: www.wbur.org
  • 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.

    Ideas   Confusion   Want  
    Frank Stella, Robert Carleton Hobbs, Singapore Tyler Print Institute (2002). “Frank Stella in 2002”
  • 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

    Artist   Doctors   Views  
Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 36 quotes from the Painter Frank Stella, starting from May 12, 1936! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Frank Stella quotes about: Art Painting