Quotes by Frank Stella - Page 1

You see what you know!
Frank Stella / Painter
Art
Knows
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What you see is what you see.
Frank Stella / Painter
Cheer
Gossip Girl
Love Life
You
See
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The aim of art is to create space.
Frank Stella / Painter
Art
Space
Illustration
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I'm more of a house painter.That's the way I work.
Frank Stella / Painter
House
Painter
Way
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A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.
Frank Stella / Painter
Cutting
Painting
Sculpture
Somewhere
Cut
Stood
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One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.
Frank Stella / Painter
Imitating
Imitating Others
Imitation
Painting
Learns
Painters
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Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.
Frank Stella / Painter
Abstract Painting
Century
Real
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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 / Painter
Art
Life
Given
Giving
Life Art Me
Prefer
Say
My Life
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I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there
Frank Stella / Painter
Art
Successful
Want
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I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there.
Frank Stella / Painter
Exalted
Pictorial
Successful
Looking
Image
Lift
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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 / Painter
Art
Art World
Goes On
World
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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 / Painter
Be You
Forget
Matisse
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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 / Painter
Black
Differences
Painting
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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 / Painter
Artist
Want
World
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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 / Painter
Art
Complicated
Fall
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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 / Painter
Abstract
Abstract Painting
Artist
Gestures
Obsessed
Wall
Worried
Painterly
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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 / Painter
Art
Space
Aim
Decoration
Illustration
Painting
Subjects
Within
After
Compromised
Create
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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 / Painter
Ideas
Too Much
Writing
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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 / Painter
Confusion
Ideas
Want
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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 / Painter
Forget
Mean
Way
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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 / Painter
Invention
Rigor
Stella
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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 / Painter
Architecture
Bad Ass
Badass
Chaos
Human Personality
Real
Turmoil
Represent
Fully
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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 / Painter
Hard Times
Mean
Real
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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 / Painter
Artist
Doctors
Views
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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 / Painter
Abstract
Doctors
Honestly
World View
World View People
Became
Believed
Broker
Lawyers
Paintings
Skewed
Slightly
View
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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 / Painter
Meat
Painting
Technique
Thrill
Picture
Actual
Laying
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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.
Frank Stella / Painter
Important
Looks
Stress
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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 / Painter
Art
Artist
Body
Eye
Hands
Seems
Stuff
Together
Totality
Best Art Good
Complete
Gesture
Hand
Large
Unless
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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 / Painter
Jobs
Crazy
People
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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 / Painter
Mouths
People
Say Anything
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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 / Painter
Artist
Integrity
Mean
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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.
Frank Stella / Painter
Artist
Careers
Thinking
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I like real art. It's difficult to define 'real' but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be.
Frank Stella / Painter
Art
May
Real
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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?
Frank Stella / Painter
Painting
Thinking
World
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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.
Frank Stella / Painter
Annoyed
Competition
Thinking
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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.
Frank Stella / Painter
Facts
People
Want
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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.
Frank Stella / Painter
Bars
Landscape
Portraits
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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.
Frank Stella / Painter
Curves
Impact
Simple
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Frank Stella Quotes - Page 1

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