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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Ellsworth Kelly Quotes

I’ve always wanted… I wanted to give people joy.

– 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

I learned my color in Europe. I’ve always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.

– 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

I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It’s always been the same way, I guess.

– 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

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

– Ellsworth Kelly

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

– Ellsworth Kelly

All my work begins with drawings.

– 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

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.

– 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, had owned it, so that’s the earliest.

– Ellsworth Kelly

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

– Ellsworth Kelly

The negative is just as important as the positive.

– Ellsworth Kelly

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

– Ellsworth Kelly

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.

– 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

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.

– 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

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

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.

– Ellsworth Kelly

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

– 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 have a sort of inner sense for scale.

– Ellsworth Kelly

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

– 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