There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

The aim of art is to create space.

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.

The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.