Ellsworth Kelly Quotes

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

I can't say what makes a picture. I can't say. It's mysterious.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

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.

I create my subjects somehow visualizing them in my style. I start as a poet, put the colors and composition down on canvas as a painter, but finish my work as a sculptor taking delight in caressing the forms.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

Being in the studio, it's more of a controlled environment, where you can be Salvador Dali and sit back and look at the painting. And you can go, 'Ah, you know what? Maybe a little bit more red over here...maybe add some blue over here.' You can sit back and look at the painting.

Color cannot stand alone.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.