Ellsworth Kelly

"Like the postcard collages, the colors are shapes in a landscape. In this case it is a painting of a landscape, not a photo as in the postcards , and therefore a contrast of the traditional painting a…"

"When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn't want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusi…"

"I began to draw from plant life and found the flat leaf forms were easier to do than thighs and breasts. I wanted to flatten. The plant drawings from that time until now have always been linear. They …"

"All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedra…"

"When I was a child, I spent all my spare time looking at birds and insects . My color use, and the object quality of the 'painting', and the use of fragmentation is closer to birds and beetles and fis…"

"I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists."

"Looking through an aperture is a way that I have been able to isolate or fragment a single form. My first memory of focusing through an aperture occurred when I was around twelve years old. One evenin…"

"My work is about structure. It has never been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. I saw the Abstract Expressionists for the first time in 1954. My line of influence has been the 'structure' of the t…"