63 Quotes by Ellsworth Kelly

In Paris in the late '40s, I started making my first reliefs. They are separate panels. I wanted to do something coming out of the wall, almost like a collage. I did a lot of white reliefs when I started because I liked antique reliefs, really old stuff.

I was taught to draw very well when I was in school at Boston. And I grew to enjoy drawing so much that I never stopped.

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.

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.

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

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.

I have a sort of inner sense for scale.

I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.

My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes - I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them.