Frank Stella Quotes
"A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Painting, Sculpture)
"Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Architecture, Chaos, Personality)
"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Art, Painting, Space)
"I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Art, Old, World)
"I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Art, Successful, Want)
"I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Painting)
"Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings."
- Frank Stella
(Related: People, Doctors, Lawyers, World)
"What you see is what you see."
- Frank Stella
"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."
- Frank Stella
(Related: May, Painting)
"I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Art, Life)
"One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Painting)