Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Isamu Noguchi

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Isamu Noguchi.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.

American - Artist | November 17, 1904 - December 30, 1988

Source: Wikipedia

The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.

Isamu Noguchi

In my work, I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever.

Isamu Noguchi

It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness.

Isamu Noguchi

When an artist stopped being a child, he would stop being an artist.

Isamu Noguchi

When the time came for me to work with larger spaces, I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.

Isamu Noguchi

Brancusi made me realize that what I had learned previously — the quick ways of doing things — was all wrong... It is not the quick solutions. It is not something you learn and apply. After all, it is a search you have to enter into yourself.

Isamu Noguchi

I learned the tricks... If you want to do academic things, you can do them. It is not difficult. Yet it is from this difficulty - the mistakes and dead ends - that artists develop, not through the quick solutions and not from something you learn and apply.

Isamu Noguchi

The attractions of ceramics lie partly in its contradictions. It is both difficult and easy, with an element beyond our control. It is both extremely fragile and durable. Like 'Sumi' ink painting, it does not lend itself to erasures and indecision.

Isamu Noguchi

For me it is the direct contact of artist to material which is original, and it is the earth and his contact to it which will free him of the artificiality of the present and his dependence on industrial products.

Isamu Noguchi

It is said that stone is the affection of old men. That may be so. It is the most challenging to work. A dialogue ensues – of chance no chance, mistakes no mistakes. No erasing or reproduction is possible, at least in the way I work, leaving nature’s mark. It is unique and final.

Isamu Noguchi

I perceive my limitations even as I work. There are times when I see nothing but restrictions, barriers. Learning takes time.

Isamu Noguchi

The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature.

Isamu Noguchi

The best is that which is most spontaneous or seemingly so.

Isamu Noguchi

Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.

Isamu Noguchi

We are a landscape of all we have seen.

Isamu Noguchi

Appreciate the moment.