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These things [cutting, cropping and shaping] always happen in strange ways. You can say after the fact what you're doing, but, believe me, you can't project it ahead. It has to be worked through before you can recognize what it was that you were looking for. It's a search; it's not like getting a brainstorm.. .It's work, yes; it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.

— Kenneth Noland Color, Format and Abstract Art (1977)

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More quotes by Kenneth Noland

You see things out of the corner of your mind or the corner of your eye that affect you just as strongly as things that you focus on, if not more so.

Conversation with Karen Wilkin (1986)

Picasso loved depicting. He didn't love painting. It's always more like filling in for Picasso. But you can see that Matisse loved the stuff. He loved making it thin, loved moving it around.

Conversation with Karen Wilkin (1986)

I knew what a circle could do. Both eyes focus on it. It stamps itself out, like a dot. This, in turn, causes one's vision to spread, as in a mandala in Tantric art.

Conversation with Karen Wilkin (1986)

We tend to discount a lot of meaning that goes on in life that's non-verbal. Color can convey a total range of mood and expression, of one's experience in life, without having to give it descriptive or literary qualities.

Color, Format and Abstract Art (1977)

There are two things that go on in art. There's getting to the essential material and a design that's inherent in the use of material, and also an essential level of expressiveness, a precise way of saying something rather than a complicated way.

Color, Format and Abstract Art (1977)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kenneth Noland (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.