Ellsworth Kelly Quotations

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.'

All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The negative is just as important as the positive.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

I have a sort of inner sense for scale.

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

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.

Time has always been very important in my work.

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.

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!'

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.

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.'

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'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.

I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess.

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

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 just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that - maybe that's possible.

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

All my work begins with drawings.

I'm not interested in the texture of a rock, but in its shadow.

Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.

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.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.

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 believe people have to be open to what's happening when they're alive.

A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose.

The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.

I'm not interested in edges. I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and white. The edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be. I want the masses to perform. When I work with forms and colors, I get the edge...

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.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.

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