Helen Frankenthaler Quotes

What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin.

I follow the rules until I go against them all.

In relations with people, as in art, if you always stick to style, manners, and what will work, and you're never caught off guard, then some beautiful experiences never happen.

The price for living the life I have
for any serious, devoted person, is that at times one must live alone, or feel alone. I think loneliness is associated in many people's minds when they think about success.

One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.

There are many accidents that are nothing but accidents-and forget it. But there are some that were brought about only because you are the person you are ... you have the wherewithal, intelligence, and energy to recognize it and do something with it.

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.

There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.

A picture that is beautiful, or that comes off, or that works, looks as if it was all made at one stroke.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

I don't start with a color order, but find the colors as I go.

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.

Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away.

You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.

The landscapes were in my arms as I did it.

Every canvas is a journey all its own.

Art has a will of its own. It has nothing to do with the taste of the moment or what's expected of you. That's a formula for dead art, or fashionable art.