Quotes by Ellsworth Kelly

About Ellsworth Kelly:

Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing simplicity of form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employs bright colors. He lives and works in Spencertown, New York.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

Ellsworth Kelly

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.

Ellsworth Kelly

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, h...

Ellsworth Kelly

My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.

Ellsworth Kelly

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!'

Ellsworth Kelly

I'm not an Expressionist. I love to look at de Kooning, but I've got this kind of secret life, and that is something that pleases me. I have to try and make something out of it.

Ellsworth Kelly

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.

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

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.

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

I have a sort of inner sense for scale.

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

Ellsworth Kelly

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.'

Ellsworth Kelly

When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.

Ellsworth Kelly

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.

Ellsworth Kelly

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.

Ellsworth Kelly

Author Bio

  • NameEllsworth Kelly
  • Descriptionsculptor from the United States
  • BornMay 31, 1923
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionSculptor; Painter; Artist
  • WorksStele II
  • AwardsKnight Of The Legion Of Honour; Praemium Imperiale