Quotes by Frank Stella

“Ken Noland would use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle [of the painting] because it's the easiest way to get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of...”

“But we're still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Donald Judd does] you have to org...”

“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way,...”

“Yes, the aluminum paint ... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see [Jackson] Pollock, [Willem] de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't ha...”

“I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas.. .I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”

“Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might...”

“One could stand in front of any Abstract-Expressionist work for a long time, and walk back and forth, and inspect the depths of the pigment and the inflection and all the painterly brushwork for ho...”

“I think I had been badly affected by ... the romance of Abstract Expressionism ... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist...”

“I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo ... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a ...”

“I wanted something that was direct – right to you eye .. ..something you didn't have to look around – you got the whole thing right away.”

“I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity.”

“I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.”

“The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.”

“If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.”

“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.”

“[Asked: Is that one of the reasons you went into sculpture?] I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.”