Ellsworth Kelly Quotes

I love paint. I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint... a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much.

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.

I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

I want paint to work as flesh.

People ask me why I don't paint oils. It takes too long. Cleaning brushes in linseed oil, and it takes six months to really dry, and all this. I don't have that kind of time. I work with acrylic. It's water based. You can clean it under water. If you spill it on yourself, you just throw it in the washing machine.

I find that acrylics dry very fast - which is supposed to be its charm; however, I find that because of that quality they don't blend as nicely as the oils. The oils, for one thing, are softer and more flexible than the acrylics. Also, the colors are brighter with oils.

I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.

I do tend to use watercolors - I love the splatter sort of thing you can do with watercolors.

I love putting paint on canvas, getting lost in the process of painting.

I'm into using acrylic, in a complicated kind of way: Making it just as good as oil paint - better, maybe. It's odd - when I started out, acrylic was for children, pretty much. It was a cheaper paint. It wasn't supposed to look very good or last very long.

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

My painting does not come from the easel.

Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.

I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

The substance of painting is light.

I wanted to learn how to paint rather than just doing black-and-white work.

White paint is my marble.

I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

I still love a lot of the guys who just paint.

For painting, I like strong lines, powerful pieces.

I used to paint.