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

Ellsworth Kelly

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" 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. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" All my work begins with drawings. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

" 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. "

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

" I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!' "

Ellsworth Kelly

" I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

" I'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning everything. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

" My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

" I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that - maybe that's possible. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

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

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. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" I have a sort of inner sense for scale. "

Ellsworth Kelly

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

Ellsworth Kelly

" The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Ellsworth Kelly

" 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

" 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

" Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art. "

Ellsworth Kelly