Frank Stella Quotes

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed.

I can bring in all these different components, and I marry these components, and I let them get traversed by the viewer, who reorganizes them.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

The unity in any painter's work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way... style.

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

Artifice is art.

Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I've always called myself an illustrator. I'm not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

When I make a picture, I make love.

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

There is no reason for me to show my collection in New York, because it's not about craft and technique there.

All the collaborators of storytelling, in film and television, have to be partly self-centered because they need to do their work the best they can, and that's what makes them really good at what they do, but then they also have to be a part of the socialist society, for the greater good.

I was always interested in photography and other forms of art.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

In art the best is good enough.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.