Quotes by Frank Stella

“What you see is what you see”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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...”

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

“Only what can be seen there [in the painting] is there.. .What you see is what you see.”

“My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to t...”

“We believe that we can find the end, and that a painting can be finished. The Abstract Expressionists always felt the painting's being finished was very problematical. We'd more readily say that ou...”

“If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about.”

“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 assertin...”

“The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!”

“When Morris Louis|Morris Louis showed in 1958, everybody [like in Art News, by Tom Hess ] dismissed his work as thin, merely decorative. They still do. Louis is the really interesting case... In ev...”

“There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.”

“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. After looking co...”

“I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at al...”

“There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various pa...”

“There's always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or surrealism, there's going to b...”

“You are always related [as an artist] to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric pain...”

“Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast ...”