(Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal
Ellsworth Kelly with two of his plant drawings earlier this week in New York. 'Shape and color are my two strong things,' he says.
Throughout his career, American abstract painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly—famed for panels of saturated color, grids of varying shades like organized confetti and shapes layered upon each other—has nurtured a second occupation: closely observed drawings of plants.
On June 5, 74 of these works—six decades' worth—will go on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw," Mr. Kelly said. "And drawing for me is the beginning of everything."
"Plant Drawings" includes his first of the genre, made in Boston and Paris in the late 1940s, as well as others made as recently as last year in upstate New York. Mr. Kelly describes his earliest attempts as "a little brutal," and his later work, refined to contour lines and "voluptuous" shapes, as more sophisticated. "When I finish, when I compare it to what I looked at, it's never as good. Nature wins," he said. "But now, 40 years, 30 years, 20 years later, I see that I was pretty good."
Mr. Kelly, 89 years old this month, spoke to The Wall Street Journal this week. Below, an edited transcript.
Wall Street Journal: When did you begin to draw plants?
Ellsworth Kelly: "Ailanthus" [1948] is the first plant drawing that I did, in Boston. Later on you'll see a drawing of just the branch that I made, 40 years later. "Hyacinth" [1949] was the first one I did when I was in Paris. It was cold and the hotels were not very well heated, so I bought a flower in the flower market and brought it into the hotel room to think about spring.
In Paris, I continued drawing constantly, people, and then when I got back to New York, I drew plants, rather. In my studio down in Coenties Slip, I had a loft with a roof. I planted sunflowers and all kinds of things on the roof. From then on, in the summers, I would continue to draw.
“'Drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.'”
Why and how do you draw?
My ideas come, and I draw. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see my plants.
© Ellsworth Kelly/Metropolitan Museum of Art
Detail of 'Apples,' by Ellsworth Kelly
All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. And I think artists all work that way really. I'm not special. But I like plants, and I don't think anyone else draws like this, today. I'm special in that way.
How do the plant drawings speak to your relationship to shapes?
The negative space is like one of my shapes, and when you look at a drawing of mine you can call off the number [of shapes]. Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, "Not really."
[Mine] is a different kind of spirituality. It's more a portrait of a plant. I do the contours, and I make space by overlapping. I don't want to put shading in because they're about drawing, not about shading.
Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
Write to Kimberly Chou at kimberly.chou@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared May 26, 2012, on page C20 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Abstract Master Puts On a Plant Show.