12 quotes
I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and the white, the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be.
There is always for me a dominant figure, I simply don't agree with people who see both readings as possible [of the figure ànd ground]
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)
The form of my painting is the content.
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)
I made the photographs just like I draw.. .I wanted the photographs [Kelly made circa 1950 in Paris] to be enlightening to my art..
Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)
I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not?] that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.
When I was a child, I spent all my spare time looking at birds and insects (beetles). My color use, and the object quality of the 'painting', and the use of fragmentation is closer to birds and beetles and fish, than it is to De Stijl or the Constructivists.
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)
This book [full of linoleum prints] will be an alphabet of pictorial elements without text, which shall aim at establishing a larger scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, and a new spirit of art accompanying architecture.
In my painting, negative space is never arbitrary. (I believe lithographs to be colored marks printed on a ground – the paper and the measure of the ground and the marks are to be considered of equal importance). In my painting, the painting is the subject rather than the subject the painting.
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)
Like the postcard collages, the colors are shapes in a landscape. In this case [his collage 'Napoleon at Würtsburg'] it is a painting of a landscape, not a photo as in the postcards [collages], and therefore a contrast of the traditional painting and a presentation of literal space on top of depicted space.
The three horizontal bands at the top [ in his collage: landscape with paintings 1954] correspond to sea, sand and sky, while the yellow/white and red/white shapes at the bottom are the paintings – though of a kind I actually painted only later. It was the collage that suggested the idea of doing such paintings.
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)
All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked (the) object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting.
Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (1987)