Ellsworth Kelly Quotes

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Nature engenders the science of painting.

Now, I love painting. I love looking. I love the fact that they don't move. They constantly change with the light. They are sort of patient.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

I paint in acrylic and sometimes in oil. Sometimes I'll paint my kids. And I'll occasionally do some photography.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

I really like the language of painting.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

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

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.

What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.