In addition to his approach towards painting, Stella famously said, “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. What you see is what you see.” Instead of painting something recognisable, Stella’s painting is about the act of painting, and its result.“Through the use of a flat regulated pattern, I could make a painting situation that read or seemed flatter, and I felt that flatness was an absolute necessity for modernist painting at the time.”Rather than allowing painting and sculpture to continue functioning as they had for centuries as a platform to portray illusion—Stella played a key role in redefining art, specifically towards its objective meaning and narrative purpose. He challenged the boundaries of aesthetic space, creating paintings that presented three-dimensional reality …show more content…
In an interview, Stella explains how his shaped canvases began;“I felt the black paintings were really right, there was a lot of things in those paintings that were not in anybody else's paintings at the time, and it seems to me that there were concerns in painting that were in a way had to address them and had to address itself too. I got very involved with the black paintings at that time, with pattern, and I began making drawings and sketches with patterns that travelled, they would move and make a jog in them and they had this slightly shaped or notched format, [figure 7], and the more I looked at it, the more I liked it, and thats the way I built the stretchers and painted the series, and that was the beginning of shaping for me.” Stella’s work encourages us to question the notion of why exactly paintings are defined as things that must hang on a wall. Stella understands painting and sculpture to be the same thing, simply displayed