Frank Stella Quotes

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.

I try to physically and mentally immerse myself in whatever it is I am doing. That is good for me as an artist. I am always looking for that part that I have never done before, which makes it all the more difficult, because people want to hire you for what they've already seen you do.

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It's like expanding its territory.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That's kind of where the text paintings came from.

As an artist you always want to challenge yourself, but as you get older you want to bring the audience with you while expanding creatively.

Art can articulate new ideas.

My goal is to communicate how powerful the breaking down of artistic barriers can be when grounded in thought, intention, and a true understanding of all the forms that are being experimented with.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.

I always want to be growing in my craft. Any artist should - whether you paint, whether you do music or film - always grow and study.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

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

I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Sometimes as an artist when things come easy to you, you look for other avenues that are more challenging to you and you try to walk those lanes.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Modern art is childish - not childlike, remember, childish; not innocent but stupid, insane, pathological. We have to get rid of this trend. We have to create a new kind of art, a new kind of creativity. We have to bring to the world again what Gurdjieff calls objective art.