Ellsworth Kelly

“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.”

“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.”

“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 did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.”

“I've always wanted... I wanted to give people joy.”

“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!'”

“I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.”

“I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning everything.”

“Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.”

“The negative is just as important as the positive.”

“The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.”

“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.”

“I have a sort of inner sense for scale.”

“I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.”

“All my work begins with drawings.”

“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.'”

“Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.”