I have a sort of inner sense for scale. Ellsworth Kelly More Quotes by Ellsworth Kelly More Quotes From Ellsworth Kelly My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good. Ellsworth Kelly hoursdrawinghalf I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line. Ellsworth Kelly drawinglineswant All my work begins with drawings. I don’t labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line. I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes. Ellsworth Kelly drawing The paintings to me are always canvas, sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood also. Ellsworth Kelly sculpturepaintingwoods 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. Ellsworth Kelly copyingdrawingtrying Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I've done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it. Ellsworth Kelly colorstogethertimelong When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything. Ellsworth Kelly feelbeginningmedrawing All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist. Ellsworth Kelly thingsmeartistwork Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.' Ellsworth Kelly leafplantssaysaid 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 before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments. Ellsworth Kelly lookingneverwomenpeople I like silence. Ellsworth Kelly likesilence I don't like acrylic because you can't get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint, the surface gets better and richer. Ellsworth Kelly betterlikeyoucolor I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room. Ellsworth Kelly paintingspaceworkway I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space. Ellsworth Kelly colorsstylecolorspace I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow. Ellsworth Kelly edgecolorsalwaystwo One of the first drawings I did in Paris - I wasn't thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing - I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring. Ellsworth Kelly medrawingflowerthinking My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest. Ellsworth Kelly greatknowdrawingpeople I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess. Ellsworth Kelly myselfimportanttimeway I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors. Ellsworth Kelly thinkcolorscolorbird I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define. Ellsworth Kelly deepcolorshardcolor
