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 ha… - Frank Stella

I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting. After looking comes imitating. In my own case it was at first largely a technical immersion. How did Kline put down that color? Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on.

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

There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.