KENNETH NOLAND, artist quotes on art + biography facts of the American painter in Color Field Painting
Kenneth Noland (1924 -2010), Color Field artist and famous by his ‘Circles’, ‘Chevrons’ and ‘Stripes’ paintings Here we collected circa 30 of his quotes on art and painting and biography facts. Noland was an artist friend of Morris Louis; both visited the studio of woman artist Helen Frankenthaler, to view her soak painting method (Greenberg told them). Most of Noland’s art quotes are taken from interviews by Diane Waldman and a conversation with Karen Wilkin. At the bottom you find some art links for more biography and life facts on Kenneth Noland and his art. – the editor.
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Kenneth Noland: ‘Bloom'; painting 1960 |
Kenneth Noland, his art quotes on painting and artist biography – Color Field
- We (Morris Louis and he, fh) were interested in Pollock but could gain no lead from him. He was too personal. But Frankenthaler showed us a way – a way to think about and use, color (remark around 1954, referring to their visit in Frankenthaler’s studio in 1952, fh)
* source, famous American artist quotes: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 194 (famous American painter Kenneth Noland: his quotes about creating modern art in Color Field Painting )
- I think that we (Morris Louis and he himself, fh) realized that you didn’t have to assert yourself as a personality in order to be personally expressive. We felt that we could deal solely with aesthetic issues, with the meaning of abstraction, without sacrificing individuality – or quality.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- But there was something else that the Abstract Expressionists taught us: they began to use something besides the conventional means of art; to want other kinds of paint, or kinds of canvas, or ways of making pictures that weren’t the usual ways. Some of the next generation, the Pop artists (like Liechtenstein and Warhol, fh), picked up this attitude and began to put actual things into art. We (Louis and he, fh) were making abstract art, but we wanted to simplify the selection of materials, and to use them in a very economical way. To get to raw canvas, to use the canvas unstretched – to use it in more basic or fundamental ways, to use it as fabric rather than as a stretched surface.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- There are two things that go on in art. There’s getting to the essential material and a design that’s inherent in the use of material, and also an essential level of expressiveness, a precise way of saying something rather than a complicated way.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- It’s been on my mind – what would something be like if it were unbalanced? It’s been a vexing question for a long time. But it took the experience of working with radical kinds of symmetry, not just a rectangle, but a diamond shape, as well as extreme extensions of shapes, before I finally came to the idea of everything being unbalanced, nothing vertical, nothing horizontal, nothing parallel. I came to the fact that unbalancing has its own order,. In a peculiar way, it can still end up feeling symmetrical. I don’t know but what the very nature of our response to art is experienced symmetrically.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- Tony Cairo (abstract sculptor, fh) and I tried to collaborate at several points and it hasn’t been successful. As a matter of fact, recently Tony has made sculpture that I have painted. He has to make the sculpture before I can paint it. That means that the form is taking precedence – that the material takes precedence as a form. , rather than color establishing the form. It’s not going to well but I’m working on it. There’s something about color that is so abstract that it is difficult for it to function in conjunction with solid form… …Color has properties of weight, density, transparency, and so forth. And when it also has to be compatible with things that have an actual density, a given form, it’s very difficult.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- It’s a simple fact, when you move from one color space to another color space, that if there’s a value contrast you get a strong optical illusion. Strong value contrast can be expressive and dramatic. Like the difference between high or low volume ot the low key and the high keys on the piano… …Actually, if you’re moving from one flat color to another flat color, if there’s a difference of color – if one is matte and the other is shiny – that contrast of tactility can keep them visually in the same dimension. It keeps them adjacent – side by side.
Another reason is that a matte color and a shiny, transparent color are emotionally different. If something is warm and fuzzy and dense we have a kind of emotional response to that. If something is clear and you can see through it, like yellow or green or red can be, we have a different emotional sensation from that. So there’s an expressive difference you can get that gives you more expressive range.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- We tend to discount a lot of meaning that goes on in life that’s non-verbal. Color can convey a total range of mood and expression, of one’s experience in life, without having to give it descriptive or literary qualities.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- It turns out that certain picture shapes don’t allow you to use different kinds of quantity distributions of color for different expressions. The quantities and configurations of colors are as important as the colrs themselves. When I first started painting circles, I went fairly quickly to a 6-foot square module. I think De Kooning said in an interview or artist’s discussion that he only wanted to make gestures as big as his arm could reach. It struck me that he was saying this physical size had to do with the expressive size of the pictures he wanted to make. And as far as I know, when I got to the 6-foor square size, it was right in terms of myself and wasn’t too much of a field. Or it was a field, yet it was still physical. And that’s why I used it for so long.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- Most all the chevrons (his series of ‘Chevron’ paintings, fh) and a majority of the circles are 6 feet square. Then, from having chosen that size , I could work in many different scales – I could make the different bands of the circles smaller or larger, or thinner or wider, which would change the internal scale of the works. Later I varied the size of the shapes themselves; sometimes I would make 3-foot, 4-foot, 7-foot, 8-foot, 9-foot and up to 10-foot sizes. It made it possible to vary all different degrees of size along with differences of scale.
Those decisions began to influence all my later work. The horizontal paintings where the ones where I varied the formats the most – I made them extremely long or fat or square, varying the sizes and scales, to put everything through permutations. That was a very liberating thing. And that, I guess, really has to do with cropping, also.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- These things (cutting, cropping and shaping, fh) always happen in strange ways. You can say after the fact what you’re doing, but, believe me, you can’t project it ahead. It has to be worked through before you can recognize what it was that you were looking for. It’s a search; it’s not like getting a brainstorm… …It’s work, yes; it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Color, Format and Abstract Art, an interview by Diane Waldman in ‘Art in America’ 65, no 3, May – June 1977, pp. 99 – 105.
- Until Abstract Expressionism you had to have something to paint about, some kind of subject matter. Even though Kandinsky and Arthur Dove were improvising earlier, it didn’t take. They had to have symbols, suggested natural images or geometry, which was something real structurally. That gave them something to paint about. What was new was the idea that something you looked at could be like something you heard. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 8.
- I knew what a circle could do. Both eyes focus on it. It stamps itself out, like a dot. This, in turn, causes one’s vision to spread, as in a mandala in Tantric art (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 8.
- I believe in working every day, and not necessarily repeating one way of working. I like to make something come out of trial and error methods – fooling around with mediums and taking the chance of its not coming to everything. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 9.
- Artists are mechanics who work with their hands, making things. Artists are involved with the means of creativity, the nature of skills, the revelation of making. Art comes from the work, I see a painting as an expressive entity. There’s no picture that I know of where the subject carries as much expressive possibility as the actual execution of the picture. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 9.
- One of my grandfathers was a blacksmith, and all the plumbers and carpenters and electricians, people who did things with their hands, thought of themselves as artists because they were good at doing things. They were proud of their making things. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 9.
- I have to work things out by painting them. I can’t just imagine what will happen. I have to do it and see it. That’s the only way I finds out if it will go anywhere. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 9.
- I had to find a way in each picture to change the drawing, shaping and tactile qualities to make these elements expressive; as the color had subsumed the possibility the possibility of these parts being on a equal basis of expressiveness. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 10.
- I believe that there are varying points of contact. You have to be able to see the whole thing first. All great paintings are sculptures – there’s so much of the actualness about it that a great painting forces you into a visual, physical movement of yourself. That’s what determines the way you experience a painting kinetically. You move closer, you sight down it, you till your head, you step back, you feel as though you are in it. That being in it is just as important as looking from a distance. (from conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 10.
- You see things out of the corner of your mind or the corner of your eye that affect you just as strongly as things that you focus on, if nor more so. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 12.
- Picasso loved depicting. He didn’t love painting. It’s always more like filling in for Picasso. But you can see that Matisse loved the stuff. He loved making it thin, loved moving it around. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 14.
- Abstract Expressionism – especially Pollock, not the more academic painters like De Kooning – made the threshold between illusion and the stuff of painting lower, the distance between them closer. Pollock made all things about the picture, all the stuff, actual. Taking the canvas off the stretcher, putting it on the floor, made it more real. Mixing up different kinds of paint, getting it to stain in, was getting at a kind of materiality. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 14.
- Morris Louis and I were interested in how Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler were using paint. Of necessity we had to get more interested in the stuff of painting. We talked a lot about whether to size the painting or not to size, how to mix up paint. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 14.
- Magna (a kind of liquid, soluble in turpentine, one of the first plastic paints available in the 1950’s, fh) had a different kind of quality from oil. You could thin it, stain with it. It would keep its intensity. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 14.
- …the possibility of dispersing colors through a given layout naturally appealed to me. The idea of putting a lot of color on the panel surfaces didn’t. It would probably have been too strong an effect to live with. I wanted something more woven in. the interstices – that was suggested by I.M. Pei – suited me better because if one chose to look at them the eye would be moved along by the differences in color. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 18.
- Value differences in painting always cut in; color differences always go side by side. Laterally. Color differences can illustrate three dimensional form, but using color in terms of hue belongs more properly to painting than modelling with dark and light (as in sculpting, fh) does. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 22.
- In the 1950s there was a kind of agreement that a good artist would do something in his picture that acknowledge the edge, but it was a question of doing something when you got to the edge. Cropping was something new. It came from photography and from Clement Greenberg. It was resisted as being too easy. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 23.
- (the ‘Surfboards’ he made mid-70s were) almost like cut-out figures without being figurative… …I think of them, in some way, as being like figures; they remind me of figures in vertical Cubist paintings. Even the small pictures have that kind of human proportion in the rectangles. It’s not exactly a reference, but the relation of length to width in the rectangles is like a person. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, pp. 23-24.
- All art that is expressive has to be illusionistic. The raw material out of which art is built is not necessarily in itself potent; you must transform it. Contours, tactility, touch, color, intervals, that’s all part of the concreteness of art. You have to make the concreteness expressive. That way you don’t cater to taste. You resist sentimentality. Things in a picture can’t remind you too much of anything else. You have to resist all that. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 24.
- When you look at a great painting it’s like a conversation. It has questions for you. It raises questions in you…. …Being an artist is about discovering things after you’ve done them. Like Cézanne – after twenty years of that mountain (St. Victoire, fh) he found out what he was doing. If it isn’t a process of discovery, it shows. I’m in it for the long haul. (conversation with Karen Wilkin, 1986-1988, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Kenneth Noland”, by Karen Wilkin, Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A. Barcelona, Spain, 1990, p. 24.
art links for more information on the American painter artist Kenneth Noland, on life and Colour Field
* biography of American artist Kenneth Noland, on Wikipedia
* official website, American famous artist Kenneth Noland
