Frank Stella Quotes

• What you see is what you see.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Wisdom

  Tags in See

• 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.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Create, Painting, Subjects

• One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Learns, Painters

• When I’m painting the picture, I’m really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don’t get any thrill out of laying it out.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Picture, Painting, Technique

• I was worried in the ’80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Against, Painting, Worried

• A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Painting, Somewhere

• Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Personality, Represent

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

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Successful, Looking

• Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn’t make abstract paintings.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Honestly, Believed

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

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Given, Like

• 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.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like, Around, World

• 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.

  Frank Stella

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Good, Gesture, Complete

Frank Stella (12)

Birth:	12th May, 1936
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Artist, Painter

About

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella’s work in 1970.

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