We [his art-friend & painter Morris Louis and Noland himself] 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..
Kenneth Noland Carolinian
Source
Cited in Anna Moszynska Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson (1990), p. 194
- year
- 1990
- locator
- p. 194
Cite this record
“We [his art-friend & painter Morris Louis and Noland himself…” Kenneth Noland. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-323FB553A1. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/323fb553a1
More from Kenneth Noland
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.
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.
In 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.