Frank Stella Quotes

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

I have a list of ideas that I want to do for my art series, but I'm always trying to figure out what's going to work. Ever since I was in art school, I would read and get ideas. Sometimes the photograph sparks an idea in me, and I continue in that direction.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

My painting does not come from the easel.

This new art made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently.

I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.

I had tried painting, mostly to give myself a greater appreciation of the craft and to inform how I looked at paintings. That led to collaging some of the work I had done on paper, and I found myself mixing in found pieces as well.

I've been attracted to imagery and occasionally I've drawn from it, but I never thought I'd be painting these paintings. I didn't have any desire to. I didn't think there was any reason to.

I've been painting all my life, and I'm serious about it. I use it as more or less an outlet.

I haven't had the opportunity to study visual art, but it was always my first love when it came to artistic expression. I started drawing and experimenting with visual art when I was 5.

I watched a lot of Jerry Rice's film just to learn how to run routes, but it was so difficult to imitate him, and he didn't play with the same body language that I wanted to play with.

Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.

I've always had an artistic hand. I took on paint when I started falling in love with the abstract expressionists. I approached it from a physical standpoint, but I've also been honing my compositional eye through film.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.

It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.

I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.

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.

I come alive when I'm painting. I like to work in oils and acrylics, and the full sensory engagement and self-expression is very stimulating to me.

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

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