Quotes from Helen Frankenthaler

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

The question of sex will take care of itself.

You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.

Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.

In relations with people, as in art, if you always stick to style, manners, and what will work, and you're never caught off guard, then some beautiful experiences never happen.

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image....

There are no rules. That is how art is born.

It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language.

Art has a will of its own. It has nothing to do with the taste of the moment or what's expected of you. That's a formula for dead art, or fashionable art.

There are no rules. That is how art is born.

I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.

The landscapes were in my arms as I did it.