Quotes from Frank Stella

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

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

What you see is what you see

After a storm ,there will be a rainbow.

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.

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.

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.

What you see is what you see

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm more of a house painter.That's the way I work.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

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.

You see what you know!

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.

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.

The aim of art is to create space.

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

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.