When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.
Interpretation
The act of drawing is essential to creativity and expression.
Ellsworth Kelly emphasizes the importance of drawing as a foundational aspect of artistic creation. He perceives a blank canvas as an opportunity to bring ideas to life, suggesting that the act of creating something from nothing is a powerful and transformative experience.
In practice
Using this quote during an art class to inspire students to explore their creativity.
Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners. . . . I wrote and still there were more. . . . No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city but the horror is too big and it goes on forever.
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