Ellsworth Kelly famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#World #Translate
In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Believe #Drawing #Gestures
I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Morning #Wall #Light
The negative is just as important as the positive.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Important #Negative
The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Sculpture #Woods #Painting
Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Art #Joy #Want
Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Drawing #Trying #Copying
All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Color #Drawing #Done
All my work begins with drawings.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Drawing
My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Drawing #Half #Hours
I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Drawing #Lines #Want
Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Strong #Color #Two
My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Form #Geometric
I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Art #Painting #Window
I'm not interested in the texture of a rock, but in its shadow.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Rocks #Shadow #Texture
I'm not interested in edges. I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and white. The edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be. I want the masses to perform. When I work with forms and colors, I get the edge...
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Black And White #Color #Want
The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Squares #Blue #Color
Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of aÂ BraqueÂ painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Glasses #Broken #Anything Goes
I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Beautiful #Artist #Men
I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Eye #Thinking #Mind
I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.
-- Ellsworth Kelly

#Curves #Color #Space

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