Words matter. These are the best Ellsworth Kelly Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My forms are geometric, but they don’t interact in a geometric sense. They’re just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don’t see them.
My drawings have to be quick. If they don’t happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they’re no good.
The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.
I’m interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting – the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I’m interested in how they react to a room.
My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn’t very expensive, I guess, because they don’t know if it’s a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who’ve owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that’s the earliest.
When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I’ve got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.
I have a sort of inner sense for scale.
I sometimes don’t try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction – and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, ‘Oh my God – that’s it!’
My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes – I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them.
I like silence.
I don’t labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.
My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I’m searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it’s always visual.
Time has always been very important in my work.
The negative is just as important as the positive.
Each drawing that I’ve done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw.
I don’t like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define.
Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.
Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I’m making drawings, and I’m not trying to make them with the shading.
I said, I don’t want to paint things like Picasso’s women and Matisse’s odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don’t want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don’t want to make what I’m looking at. I want the fragments.
I’ve always wanted… I wanted to give people joy.
I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.
I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that – maybe that’s possible.
One of the first drawings I did in Paris – I wasn’t thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing – I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring.
In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its ‘measure.’
Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I’ve done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.
Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
All my work begins with drawings.
All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.
I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.
In Paris in the late ’40s, I started making my first reliefs. They are separate panels. I wanted to do something coming out of the wall, almost like a collage. I did a lot of white reliefs when I started because I liked antique reliefs, really old stuff.
