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"One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters."
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"Painting n: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."

"I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting."

"In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting."

"Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."

"But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it."

"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."
Explore more quotes by Frank Stella

"Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings."

"I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there."

"I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you."

"Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real."

"I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall."

"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."

"When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out."
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