Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors - Page 6

What's interesting about art in public spaces is that the public really sort of takes over and uses it in ways that you didn't anticipate.

Stone Mountain Memorial is the greatest project of its sort ever conceived. It should be finished, because it represent an idea as deep, as basic as the rocks on which our wonderful continent rests.

For we constantly deal with practical problems, with molders, contractors, derricks, stone-men, ropes, builders, scaffoldings, marble assistants, bronze-men, trucks, rubbish men, plasterers, and what-not else, all the while trying to soar into the blue.

I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

[On leaving the U.S. for Italy:] I ought to be accomplishing thrice as much as now, and feel that I am soul-bound and thought-bound in this land of dollars and cents.

I am the most curious of all to see what will be the next thing that I will do.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same, for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness - to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world as our consciousness wants it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself.

When I was four or five years old, I heard a lot of stories about the Holocaust because both my parents were survivors. I'm sure that was very important in my life. My father snuck out from under the floorboards to make love to my mother. I can't imagine why they kept me.

I used anything, various materials; this is wood, and this is mixed up clay, wedged together, clay with glazes and stuff like that.

I will never forget my beautiful days with you in Shanklin, they are certainly the most pleasant ones of my life. Look, I have tears in my eyes just to think about it. I am furious to be here, it is the end of happiness for a whole year.

The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others.

My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.

Don't ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them

Steel is such a nice material to use. It can move. It's terribly easy, you just stick it or you cut it off, and bang! you're there: it's so direct. I think Manet was very direct, he didn't prepare his canvases like Courbet, he just put paint straight on and it's very like that with steel.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

The twin guardian angels whose eyes and hands and wings had focused protective attention on the souls that lay there no longer faced each other. They stared blindly into a random middle distance. The scroll they held between them proclaiming eternal resurrection was broken in two.

I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well.

I've filled my whole life trying to preserve the memory of living, in the fight against dying. Perhaps the only thing I've done, since stopping death is impossible, is to show this fight. The fight itself does not satisfy us either.

A woman may not hit a ball stronger than a man, but it is different. I prize that difference.

If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to “good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl's unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself.

In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

One senses the figures as passing by the tree line and, caught in the presence of the wall, turning to gaze upon it almost as a vision.

Five percent seems very little to ask when you consider that the artist, through his or her efforts over many years, is largely responsible for the increased value of their work.

Coming [to Paris] has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work.

The more you work, the less you exist. I believe (at least, I used to believe, because I no longer think this is entirely true) that the artist is like someone carrying a mirror in which everyone can look and recognize themselves, so that the person who carries the mirror ends up being nothing.

I have not attempted to try to relive or recreate the past; but I have sought guidance from those timeless elements in the past which remain valid and vital to the future ... The purpose of my art is to seek beauty and truth, and to explore and glorify the human being and the universe.

There are three fundamental poses of the human figure. One is standing. The other is seated, and the third is lying down... Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.

Laws cannot be imposed on him who is the master of the law.

My intention was to create a work of art which would transcend the visible, which cannot be perceived except in stages, with the understanding that it is a partial revelation and not the perpetuation of the existing. My aim is to show what can be seen within the limits of possibility which exists in the midst of coming into being.

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.

My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.

Young people in the business have grown up and made the wrong decisions, or bad decisions, and haven't been good role models. To be someone that people look up to is important to me.

We must create our own world.

I'm just honoring my mother's words. She always told me, 'The smaller your work, the bigger your name will become.'

When I was a kid, I had trouble at school because of my learning disabilities. Carving is my body compensating for the lack of other skills.

Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.

I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.

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

Father's ideals became part of me and still are today. His reserve, deeply rooted liberal views, his provocative humour, his passion for work and love of risk are also mine.

I create for artistic intent only and do everything from life.

The first inspiration I ever had was the cosmos, the planetary system.

I don't believe that you can put content into art. The content is in yourself.

Monumental is not a matter of size.

I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

Friends are the best to turn to when you're having a rough day.

When I accepted the commission, I had something of an epiphany in the research I did about the agency, actually the science of espionage. I realized there is a connection between the sciences and the invisible forces of man.

There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.

Music is the softest cushion in the world.

Let the work speak for itself.