Helen Frankenthaler quotes

Helen Frankenthaler was an influential American abstract artist, known for her pioneering “soak-stain” painting technique. Her work played a key role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She inspired generations of artists with her innovative approach to color and composition. Here are 54 of her quotes:

I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.

Helen Frankenthaler

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.

Helen Frankenthaler

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

Helen Frankenthaler

I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.

Helen Frankenthaler

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

Helen Frankenthaler

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

Helen Frankenthaler

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.

Helen Frankenthaler

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it as well - she did this and then she did that; there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.

Helen Frankenthaler

.. drawing, always all my learning had to do with drawing. And I never really thought about color at all. When I first started thinking about color it was sort of out of perversity. In other words, say around 1950 and '51, it occurred to me that something ugly or muddy could be a color as well as something clear and bright and a nameable, beautiful, known color.

Helen Frankenthaler

I still, when I judge my own pictures (either while I'm working or after I think it's finished) determine if they work in a certain kind of space through shape or color. I think all totally abstract pictures – the best ones that really come off – Newman, Pollock, Noland – have tremendous space; perspective space despite the emphasis on flat surface. For example, in Noland a band of yellow in relation to a band of blue and one of orange can move in depth although they are married to the surface. This has become a familiar explanation, but few people really see and feel it that way.... in my work, because of color and shape a lot is read in the landscape sense..

Helen Frankenthaler

When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is... It is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal, Signature....'Gesture' must appear out of necessity, not habit.

Helen Frankenthaler

I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted [as in her painting 'Chairman of the Board', 1971].... That 'negative' space has just as active a role as the 'positive' painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.

Helen Frankenthaler

And then [after the break with Clem [Greenberg], c. 1955] I investigated something which is related to what I talked about in 'Number 14', [of Jackson] Pollock, a side of me that --.... Well, I always use this word and I'm always dissatisfied with it because it's not what I mean at all, but a 'surreal' side. There are two words that are applied to me often that I think are very wrong but there aren't any other words that I can think of at the moment that would --. But one is 'lyrical' and the other is 'surreal'.... I understand what's meant when that word [lyrical] is used in relation to my pictures. And I don't think 'lyric' is a put down but 'lyric' never implies the profound enough.... In other words, 'lyric' can imply light, untouched, angelic, witty. Which are marvelous qualities. But 'light' can also imply simple, which is not a marvelous quality. I don't know..

Helen Frankenthaler

Painting is very private and personal. There's an emotional content, but I'm more involved in the light and color and drawing of a painting. I don't set out to portray an emotion.

Helen Frankenthaler

We [Helen and Clement Greenberg] went through the hill towns of Italy together, and we'd picnic in Perugia and argue about the Quattrocento painters and why this Simone Martini was better than that Simone Martini, or why this Sienese guy was better than that guy from Orvieto. I learned how to look at modern pictures because of Old Masters, and vice versa.

Helen Frankenthaler

So I would say, blanket, from the time I was 17 until I was 20 [1945-48] when I graduated from Bennington [Art College] as far as painting went I had a depth analysis of what made Cubism work and its revolution, and all it opened up. And in history it was just the right moment to get it.... I did in my senior show two little pictures that are every bit as good, though I think ex post facto, nothing can be every bit as good ever - the way the best 'drip' Pollock made four years later than the best drip Pollock is not good -. But I could do Braque-s and Picasso-s that were angelic and completely understood, I mean really. I mean Paul [ [Paul Feeley ] really honored me and by that time it was a friendship, it wasn't a --. I mean our lives were in each other.

Helen Frankenthaler

I have a whole series of pictures that are, I mean in a sense, landscapes. Well, I wouldn't hold the landscape in front of me and translate it more abstractly into the painting, no. But I would - again in that American expedient thing you [Barbara Rose, earlier in the interview] were talking about - thinking ideas in my language. Sort of like today. 'Hm, bunch of roses', hm. 'Flags out the window', hm.... But once it got down on the surface I would say in 99 times out of a 100, out of 101, nobody would come along and say how come you put 'shoes' in a picture. I mean it would be too brown or too green.

Helen Frankenthaler

For me, being a 'lady painter' was never an issue. I don't resent being a female painter. I don't exploit it. I paint.

Helen Frankenthaler

There are three subjects I don't like discussing. My former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries.

Helen Frankenthaler

Look.... the sky!... you can feel the weight of it. It's as if it were packed with snow.

Helen Frankenthaler

I really learned how to look at art.... before 1960. And in a sense that sharpened my eye for abstract pictures. Because, it's light in the painting that makes it work. It's light in the painting that makes it work.

Helen Frankenthaler

I mixed [early 1950's] funny shades of colors and used them but I used them because they made the drawing in my picture move. It wasn't because I was in love with the idea of putting color down. But these colors were the expedient things to use for the way I drew and I say 'draw' not meaning line, though it might have included line. But the way I drew or envisioned or made my work. And it happened that it came out stressing color. But I did not have a vision or a notion about color per se being the thing that would make me or my pictures work or operate.

Helen Frankenthaler