"I made it from just three lines in less than a minute. It was the first of the series [Water lily drawings, Kelly made in 1968; he admired the Waterlilies paintings of Monet that got the weight right. My eye followed my hand. Then I did all the others, but this was the best."
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
"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 things I liked: French Romanesque architecture, Byzantine, Egyptian and Oriental art, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Klee, Picasso, Beckman.."
"When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didnt want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White 1952. Its the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects."
"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 1940s and 1950s 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 [from Paris] 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 1960s. 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."
"I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not?] 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."
"Like the postcard collages, the colors are shapes in a landscape. In this case [his collage Napoleon at Würtsburg] it is a painting of a landscape, not a photo as in the postcards [collages], and therefore a contrast of the traditional painting and a presentation of literal space on top of depicted space."
"Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt."