Top 15 Frank Stella Quotes

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.

People say that the paintings are always big because they're striving for effect, but they're also big so that I don't trip over myself, so that I have room to work, and people can come in and be comfortable.

When people still talk about art that I made in the 60's— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!

They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work.

Time is what you have left.. ..you just march with it and use it the best you can.

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.

I know what I want, but it's physically beyond me now. I can work on what I can handle. It's a playoff between the object and my physical limits.

The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.

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.

[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 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.

If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.

The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.

I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.

I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity.