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.”

“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.”

“All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.”

“All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.”

“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 be...”

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

“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.”