Ellsworth Kelly Quotes

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

A good artist has less time than ideas.

Hurry boys, hurry, we have to make a quick change or the hour will be up.

We must go fast, because the race is against time.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

When you are doing a piece you are with it. You don't want to wait until next week, when experience will have given you something else.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way.

I'm very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work it's way into the piece.

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.

I find that the quest to be perfect and make perfect music is like a black whole. I realize that you can come with the intention to capture a vibe and use a formula, but you have to accept that most of the time its not going to be what you envisioned and you might manifest something better. I think that's been the hardest thing to wrap my head around that most ideas we go for ends up sounding different. I think art in general should be about enjoying the process and the experience. All that matters is if you feel the music and it captures the element your going for.

The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

My recent drawings that personal ones aren't fashion-related. I sometimes sit and draw people on the bus, or some fantasy hybrid animal. You know, wherever the hand will lead.

I've never really had a certain style of music in mind that I make, or am really adamant on how something should sound, but I like the process of not knowing, of just seeing what happens and what comes out.

Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.

The whole point of being an artist is to have no agenda. To say, you know, I don't know what I am going to do tomorrow, I don't know what it's going to look like, and I'm going to have a go at it.

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

I've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.