Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stellais an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth12 May 1936
CityMalden, MA
CountryUnited States of America
imitating-others painting imitation
One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.
wall gestures abstract-painting
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
thinking world painting
As far as I was concerned, with the early paintings, I liked them, I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't think it was the end of the world. I also thought of it as a kind of structure, a base to build on. So this proves I can do this and that, and they don't collapse, so then what can I do from here? How can I build on it?
differences black painting
There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.
cutting sculpture painting
A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.
real abstract-painting century
Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.
writing ideas too-much
Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.
bars landscape portraits
You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.
forget matisse be-you
You couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.
artist world want
Any artist can't get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you're only interested in what you're doing right now.
thrill may technique
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.
invention stella type
Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.
integrity mean artist
The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.
doctors views people
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