Frank Stella Quotes

There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painters technique and tools.

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. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.

[Asked: "Is that one of the reasons you went into sculpture?"] I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.

The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.

I hate to say this. ..it's made to order. Then, I disorder it a little bit or, I should say, I reorder it. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to claim that I had the ability to disorder it. I wish I did.

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.

They are more complex to begin with, but their organization, the way they end up being put together, isn't that different. You can't shake your own sensibility. No matter what the concept is; the artist's eye decides when it's right ... which is a notion of sensibility.

There's always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or surrealism, there's going to be someone who's not painting complicated paintings, someone who's trying to simplify...

I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas.. .I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.

But we're still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Donald Judd does] you have to organize the structure. I don't think our work that radical in any sense because you don't find any really new compositional or structural element. I don't know if that exists. It's like the idea of the color you haven't seen before. Does something exist that's as radical as a diagonal that's not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can't describe?