Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors - Page 3

What comes from oneself, is nearly from no one. There is only me as a link.

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.

I think art is about human existence. Almost by default I'm expressing my experiences as a human.

Glass is the most magical of all materials. It transmits light in a special way.

I'm happy with the man I'm becoming.

But boy, right away it is fun to play around with the Paintbox program.

...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

I know too well how you can go from feeling like your sister knows you better than anyone else in the world, to feeling jealous of her, to wanting to strangle her ha-ha.

I was lucky to be born during the time of minimalism. I think I can be colder because of this. In form I speak with minimalism but my feeling is sentimental - I am a sentimental minimalist.

It's not me trying to act or pose in a certain way. It's a lifestyle - like a suaveness or a swag, per se.

You promised to take care of me and not to turn your back on me. How is it possible that you never wrote to me even once and you never came back to see me? Do you think that it is fun for me to spend months, even years, without any news, without any hope!

I go to my studio every day. Some days work comes easily. Other days nothing happens. Yet on the good days the inspiration is only an accumulation of all the other days, the nonproductive ones.

There are many kinds of conceit, but the chief one is to let people know what a very ancient and gifted family one descends from.

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

The universe is real, but you can't see it. You have to imagine it.

What comes from oneself is nearly from no one. There is only me as a link.

An artist will starve unless he is near big centers of population. We should create many of these cultural centers right in our own slums.

There's not been one normal thing in my life.

But part of the enjoyment I take in it is finding the most efficient way to do it, which doesn't mean the corrections aren't made. I like to have a feeling of the whole task before I start, even if it changes.

Turner - whether on canvas or paper - can create almost measurable distances of space and air - air that you can draw, in which you can work out what the section through it would be. The space he creates is not emptiness; it is filled with 'solid' atmosphere.

The value of the creative faculty derives from the fact that faculty is the primary mark of man. To deprive man of its exercise is to reduce him to subhumanity.

We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.

I am only limited by the amount of life I have left to capture the ideas I am already working on. Another problem is that I am not sure if I would rather create or collect art. Collecting art is another passion of mine.

If you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself.

I know who I am and what I'm doing in my life and what I've accomplished and continue to accomplish as a performer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person, as a human being.

And so I put down some of the things that he said, about keeping your tools sharpened and not letting them lie on the ground where they get hurt or get abused and dirty and can't find them. And some thoughts about how his father used to do things.

My problem painting from my life was I found that you can't paint dirt without romanticising it.

Art is the easiest thing in my life, and that's ironic. It doesn't mean I've worked little on it, but it's the only thing I never had to... I have no fear. I could take risks.

I wanted to show the history and strength of all kinds of black women. Working women, country women, urban women, great women in the history of the United States.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

Everything for me has always been opposites; nothing has ever been in the middle... My life never had anything normal or in the center.

Electric light is just another instrument. I have no desire to contrive fantasies mediumistically or sociologically over it or beyond it.

Theories are patterns without value. What counts is action.

Going from the written, flat word to the three-dimensional object, that was one of the more enriching things that I've done.

Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing thing. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it requires simply good sense in the originators & good will in the rest of us.

There are times when I've inhaled my work. There are artworks still inside of me.

Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.

My goal is to make fine art, and fine art comes from the soul. If you have virtuosity and facility, you can take and create something of significance.

To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.

Some sculptors make drawings, I make heads.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

I use zero photography. I have a photographic memory and a complete knowledge of anatomy and physiology, and an interest in grasping the moment of what is happening, not just the outside, but the inside out.

Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man, it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, for she must either neglect her family, or her profession.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

And then what makes the work interesting is if you choose the right questions.

I invent nothing, I rediscover.

The Force of Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and in its active contagiousness.

The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging.

People find it very, very difficult to believe what I've done. Scientists have seen my work and they can't explain it. Even nano-scientists have seen it and been totally shocked. But if any man on Earth wants to challenge me, I'm ready. Bring it on.

In this case we're building a corner to stretch a fence and hang a gate. It had a real purpose in the ranch here. I needed to do this. But at the same time, it made a beautiful structure.

I'm like a mad professor, but without the spiky hair.

Being a creation of Man, art re-creates Man.

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

I think that to be a good artist, you have to have ideas as well as manual skills. It's a blend of the two, hopefully, and there are a lot of people there that can do things well, but they might not be devoid of good ideas or maybe they're not especially interesting ideas, or maybe there's a good idea that a person is unable to execute in the manner that does justice to the idea.

With long skirts, you can really buff. People open doors for you and everything.

I like to use my hands and make things... It might seem pretty stupid or pointless but that doesn't matter... some of the most interesting work is the stuff that starts like that - out of a raw need for activity.

I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.