Quotes from Ellsworth Kelly

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.

Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I've done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.

In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'

My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual.

All my work begins with drawings.

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.

In Paris in the late '40s, I started making my first reliefs. They are separate panels. I wanted to do something coming out of the wall, almost like a collage. I did a lot of white reliefs when I started because I liked antique reliefs, really old stuff.

I don't like acrylic because you can't get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint, the surface gets better and richer.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes - I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them.

Each drawing that I've done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw.

Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.'

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

I'm not an Expressionist. I love to look at de Kooning, but I've got this kind of secret life, and that is something that pleases me. I have to try and make something out of it.

I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define.

My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.

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.

When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.

I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.

I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

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

Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.

The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.

I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.