Color Field Painting Quotes

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.

In the past 10 years, I've looked at life as this Pollock stuff. And now I'm almost in the post Pollock phase.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

I like '50s and '60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols.

After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.

Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.

I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.

I'm inspired by Jackson Pollock; splashing layer upon layer, using different materials, experimenting with new methods to produce something fresh. I'd love to be able to create in this way!

In the '50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.

Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.

Minimal art went nowhere.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.

I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards.

I don't wake up in the morning and think about Franz Kline.

I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism.

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

My favorite Twombly is 'Apollo and the Artist,' with the big 'Apollo' written across it.

Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual, ideas of their art.