Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors - Page 5

I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.

Most of us have to be transplanted before we blossom.

The qualities that one needs to be a good goalkeeper are exactly the same as to be a good sculptor. In both professions one should have a good relationship with time and space.

You find me at work; excuse the dust on my blouse. I sculpt my marble myself.

To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen.

To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete... with Dada I also have in common a certain mistrust towards power. We don't like authority, we don't like power.

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

I paint with shapes.

Lincoln has been my first love, and as always with first loves, it fixed a standard. So I scaled sunlit heights with Lincoln and produced the colossal marble head in the rotunda of the capitol of the United States.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

There's this privileged position of being an artist where you can do things on a more experimental nature simply to see what happens.

If you touch something you leave a charge on it, and anybody else touching it connects with you, in a way.

For me, my work is pretty much a lot of my identity. I mean I live to work, basically. With money I'm able to earn I don't put into clothes especially or things like that. I use it as a way of buying time to work. That's how I see money for me. It represents time to be by myself working on these ideas. So in that sense, the work is kind of a surrogate religion, maybe not so surrogate, maybe it is part religion.

Nobody can teach what is inside a person; it has to be discovered for oneself and a way must be found to express it.

I have been making wire jewelry - and think I'll really do something with it, eventually.

As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible.

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.

I wish that I spoke more languages because I think each language is a window completely.

Art itself has become an extraordinary thing - the activity of peculiar people - people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.

I have the most openness about my art... It's total freedom and willingness to work. I'm willing really to walk on the edge, and if I haven't achieved it, that's where I want to go. But in my life - maybe because my life has been so traumatic, so absurd - there hasn't been one normal, happy thing.

I should like to achieve free, spontaneous painting delineating a powerful, strong structured image. One must be possible with the other. A difficult problem in itself, but one which I shall achieve.

I resemble the father I once hated.

With art, your motor sense should be developed at full capacity.

Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.

You don't need to go to church to be a Christian. If you go to Taco Bell, that doesn't make you a taco.

When I was making a shift... from one thing to another I didn't want to be answering questions: 'How come you're doing this?' 'How come you're doing that?' so I didn't allow anyone in my studio and I just worked away in there.

Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

I have had the problem of seeing my male model go to Italy and... stay there.

I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here.

In the 1970?s I made horses out of real mud and sticks. They were, in part, meant to reflect how much a horse is part of his environment. I combined the figure and the ground.

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Nebraska people have the heart and power to create real beauty and art if they will only wake up and do it.

To describe and explain my ideas is to lose them.

I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great ,and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.

I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded.

Scale is very, very important, like the scale of a person is very important. It's to do with the size of our space, the fact they are big sculptures, they are still human scale.

In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It's that imbalance which impels us. I often think that all I want to do now is to avoid suicide, accidental or otherwise. Other than that, I think living on the edge is what drives my work and me beyond a certain point. The artist lives with anxiety. When you finally reach a plateau of achievement, there comes a new anxiety - the hunger to push on still further. That angst is what makes you go forward.

I've had over a dozen models come in and pose fro me live for these new Cirque pieces. Cirque is a world-wide phenomenon and they are just incredible athletes. I've been to all the performances and am really fascinated by all of their productions.

Imagination is a very precise thing, you know - it is not fantasy; the man who invented the wheel while he was observing another man walking - that is imagination!

Ten thousand years from now our civilization will have passed without leaving a trace. A new race of people will inhabit the earth. They will come to Mount Rushmore and read the record we have made.

There is a childlike side in the work of the Dadaists, Klee, Miró, Calder and Picasso. I am trying to make things that are very, very serious, and what comes out of it is things that are quite friendly, gay, and sometimes even amusing. [Chaim] Soutine tried to work like Rembrandt, and yet there is nothing of Rembrandt in his pictures.

Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building -- like Tower Bridge -- or a classical front put on a steel frame -- like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living -- not something added, like sugar on a pill.

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'.

Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn't like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

Don't fear anything for your letters, they are burnt one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.

A large part of California is a sensual state. It has a huge range of geographical features and in addition to the deserts and the mountains and the huge coast line. The fact that we don't have harsh seasons, like they have in the East, means you can have convertible cars. There's more sunshine, per year here, and it affects people psychologically and physically. I think California has always been an attractive place for many, a lot of strange cults have been here over the years. Again, it's an experimental place.

I have all sorts of problems and feel discouraged.

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

The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.

Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things.

Political events are part of everyday life [in Colombia], so art and politics came to me as a natural thing, something that has been very much present in my life from the start.

Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.

I'm a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics.

I believe that at the beginning of the life of every artist there is some kind of trauma. We have a problem and all of our life we try to speak about this problem. My trauma was historical. When I was three or four, all the friends of my parents were survivors of the Holocaust; they spoke a lot about that. My father was hiding during the war, it was something totally present when I was a boy. It is sure that it has made me.