Quotes from Ellsworth Kelly

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.

I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.

I'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning everything.

I've always wanted... I wanted to give people joy.

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.

One of the first drawings I did in Paris - I wasn't thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing - I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring.

The negative is just as important as the positive.

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.

I was taught to draw very well when I was in school at Boston. And I grew to enjoy drawing so much that I never stopped.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

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

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.

I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.