I love talking about Don Judd. He’s one of my heroes. I love the way he used color, and how it carried on his whole life. That’s an important part of my thinking and my work. When I started out, that kind of formal style didn’t have color in it. I moved toward color in the ’70s, like the primary colors in “Little Three for Two: Red, Yellow, Blue” [1976]. Judd was serious with color and not at all decorative, but there was an understory of a seductive idea.

One thing I really liked about Judd was that his work related to domestic hardware. I saw a show in Pasadena in 1971 with rectangular things sticking out of the wall. They looked like shelves.

Marfa is intimate, even though it’s also grand. It has this kind of domestic style to it even though it’s really big. The same for Spring Street. It’s a home, but it’s kind of tight and formal in a provocative way. He always refused to make the plywood chair backs more comfortable — to me that was significant and provocative, and not necessarily in a negative way. He was totally against negotiating.

I saw him give a talk once. The main thing I remember about him was he was — kind of antagonistic. I thought it was really great that he was a critic, too. He was both tough and seductive in his way. I was always sort of like that, too.

Frank Stella

The artist, a peer of Judd’s, began his career with hard-edge geometric paintings and moved to three-dimensional work, as Judd did.