Frank Stella Art Quotations

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.

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.

I think for a lot of artists, if you're lucky enough to have a kind of career, especially toward the end, you start to think about what the whole ensemble looks like. It's the whole that counts. The parts are given, but you don't know how the whole thing's going to look when it's all put together.

The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

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

The aim of art is to create space.

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.

I like real art. It's difficult to define 'real' but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be.

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.

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.

You see what you know!

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

Remember that the '60s was up against the best American art that anyone had produced, and probably the best international art of the 20th century, minus Picasso and Matisse. But who was going to be as good as Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still? Maybe we weren't, but there was a lot of variety and a lot of trying.