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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

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Frank Stella
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: January 1
Designer
Engraver
Graphic Artist
Painter
Photographer
Printmaker
Sculptor
Malden
Massachusetts
Sakauil
Frank Philip Stella
Views
Lawyer
Everybody
Believed
Artist
Honestly
Skewed
Wanted
Doctors
Brokers
Make
Became
Lawyers
Things
Couldn
Paintings
World
View
Slightly
People
Painting
Abstract

More quotes by Frank Stella

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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.
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All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…What you see is what you see.
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I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there
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I'm more of a house painter.That's the way I work.
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No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body you can really lean on it.
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The aim of art is to create space.
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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.
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The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings. Keep my mouth shut. You'll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again, people will always tell you about it. Even if you were the source of what's wrong with it.
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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.
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I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.
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One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.
Frank Stella
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Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.
Frank Stella
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I think for a lot of artists, if you're lucky enough to have a kind of career, especially toward the end, you start to think about what the whole ensemble looks like. It's the whole that counts. The parts are given, but you don't know how the whole thing's going to look when it's all put together.
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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
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You see what you know!
Frank Stella
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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.
Frank Stella
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Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.
Frank Stella
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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?
Frank Stella