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.
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience.
I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.
That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.
Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.
I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.
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