Ellsworth Kelly Quotes

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.

I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.

Rock & roll is not obscure, it's really easy to understand. So is my painting.

My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I need art around me always.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and, also, old films.

I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have.

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist…..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

Why should art continue to follow nature when every other field has left nature behind?