It was all the same: anything goes.
Explore the eclectic influences that shaped Ellsworth Kelly’s avant-garde art.
Birds
In 1923, Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York.
Ellsworth Kelly at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (Photo:Stock Photosfrom Jorn Pilon/Shutterstock)
Kelly’s most well-known works are highly abstracted.
I believe my early interest in nature taught me how to see.
My forms are geometric, but they don’t interact in a geometric sense, Kelly explained.
Ellsworth Kelly, “The Meschers,” 1951 (Photo:Wikimedia Commons[Fair Use])
They’re just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don’t see them.
From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.
Plants
Architecture was not the only muse Kelly cultivated while living in Paris.
What sets them apart, however, is how he observes his subjects.
My ideas I can find anywhere, he said.
Not so much in the plant drawings.
I have to see them.
