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" 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

Book

Bird

Boy

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Ellsworth Kelly

Five

Get

" All my work begins with drawings. "

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

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

Ellsworth Kelly

Hard

Define

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

" I've always wanted... I wanted to give people joy. "

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

" 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

Ideas

I Can

" 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!' "

" 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

Trying

Make

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Each drawing that I've done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw. "

" 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. "

" The negative is just as important as the positive. "

" 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. "

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