Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Martin Puryear

The fire was followed by a period of grieving and then by an incredible lightness, freedom, and mobility.

I was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure objects.

I think of moving as a kind of saving grace.

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology.

I felt it was part of the spirit of the whole program to do more than simply make an object.

The work is flowing from an inner knowing of how things really are.

I realized it wasn't necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

There is the potential for much more spontaneity with prints than there is with the sculpture, which tends to be very slow, accretive kind of process-labor intensive.

I’m interested in vernacular cultures, where people lived a little closer to the source of materials and the making of objects for use. And for me, not to rely strictly on the history of art has always been an interesting process, to be looking into areas that we call craft and trades.

When I went to Africa I think that was when I really found a way to deal with what I had recently discovered; in two-dimensional terms, at least.

There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.

The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand.