Carolina QuotesIn the 1950's 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.
Kenneth Noland Carolinian
Source
Kenneth Noland, p. 23
- work
- "Conversation with Karen Wilkin" (1986-1988)
- year
- 1986
- locator
- p. 23
Cite this record
“In the 1950's there was a kind of agreement that a good arti…” Kenneth Noland. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1811545AE2. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1811545ae2
More from Kenneth Noland
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 [Mont St. Victoire] 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.
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.
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 colors 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-foot 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.