"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 cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting."

“I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and the white, the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be.”

“In my painting, negative space is never arbitrary. . In my painting, the painting is the subject rather than the subject the painting.”

“In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Fauves – Matisse, Derain – were using bright colours in their full intensity, which continued with Kandinsky, Malevich, Kirchner, Léger and Mondrian. They employed all the colours of the spectrum. In the 1940's and 1950's the majority of the Abstract Expressionists in New York rebelled against this European use of colour and mostly used mixed colours. That is, the Abstract Expressionists did use bright colours sometimes, but they tended to paint wet-on-wet, which muddled their hues. As Matisse would say, a small patch of any one colour is far less intense than a large one of the same colour. I returned in 1954 to New York and showed paintings done in France at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956 with bright colours that wouldn’t really be used until the Pop artists in the 1960's. My idea of using colour at its full intensity, which began with Colors for a Large Wall, hasn’t changed in the 60 years that I’ve been painting.”

“The form of my painting is the content.”

“VernissageTV Interview with Ellsworth Kelly at the Art 39 Basel Fair.”

“Simple, I don't like the word simple. I like easy better. I want to forget about the technique. I sweat and worry but I don't want it look like that; but you can’t separate the artist and his technique.”