Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors - Page 7

All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.

I love the round, the curves, the undulation, the world is round, the world is a breast

The microscopic world became my obsession.

We all die twice - once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.

It's my destiny to make a place where people can come and be happy: a garden of joy.

If you choose the wrong questions and you proceed, you still get a result, but it's not interesting.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Early One Morning takes time and, I mean, all things like that I felt were very important.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

In art, everything is particular. The more particular and the more intimate you get, the more you can give in the piece.

Art is a funny thing. It's a communicative medium. It really is, and it works outside of literature, the movies, stage, it has its own realm. It's like when you say "The Arts," those are all the arts, dance, theater, ballet. So within that set of areas of expression, we have visual art and it is visual and it's about looking at something and seeing it in the light with our eyes, maybe touching it or not touching it, or wanting to touch it, not being able to touch it.

I'm also interested in creating a lasting legacy for collectors because bronze will last for thousands of years so I'm not really selling the art to this particular collector but it is being passed on.

My work knocks people out; you've not seen the best of me yet.

A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance.

China is important to the world in that they are a force and on the move. Exposing them to figurative art opens up a potential for artistic expression far greater than anyone would ever have dreamed possible until today. It is this very spirit of the struggle and determination to triumph that inspires creative expression.

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

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm.

I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially... black, white and grey. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing.

The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.

There is a child in all of us.

There is a connection between me and the collectors, and as admirers of the work they tell me about the differences the pieces are able to make in their lives on a daily basis.

I cannot recall a period when I did not draw; and at school, the studies that were distasteful to me, mathematics and grammar, were retarded by the indulgence of teachers who were proud of my drawing faculties, and passed over my neglect of uncongenial subjects.

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work.

I'm so drawn to the frontier mentality and that idea of having to figure everything out from scratch.

At any one time, I'll have 30 to 40 pieces going on in the studio, so this is not economically driven at all.

The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.

I'll talk. You'll listen.

I come from a place where you have a lot of sky. But [in New York City] you have to really look up to realize that there is eventually sky, somewhere. ...Sky is not a common commodity.

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

Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition.

The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.

In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.

I have ALWAYS wanted to write - I was the seven-year old entering local library poetry contests, and I recently found my eighth-grade yearbook when we moved, and I had listed "WRITER" as my future occupation. It's always been something I've been hungry to do, but I think the more practical side of me (encouraged by the more practical sides of my parents of course) shied away from pursuing a career in creative writing, in favor of something a little "safer" like law.

I sleep completely naked to make me believe you are here, but when I wake up it is not the same thing. Most of all, don't deceive me with other women any more.

I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

It comes down to the way you treat people. When you treat people with dignity and respect all the time, you can work through anything.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

I love red so much, I almost want to paint everything red.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.

I never feel age... If you have creative work you don't have age or time.

I became obsessed with making more and more tiny things. I think I was trying to find a way of compensating for my embarrassment at having learning difficulties: people had made me feel small so I wanted to show them how significant 'small' could be.

I was headed in the wrong direction. I didn't think I'd make it to 21. My Uncle Chuck saved my life. He was a graphic designer, and he gave me my first sketchbook. In the front, he wrote, 'Wear it like your underwear.'

I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn't hold me back and my teachers couldn't criticize me. That's how my career as a micro-sculptor began.

Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.

And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you're going through family troubles, when you're heartbroken, when you're frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career.

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... The artist lives with anxiety.

When I was in New York it was like a maze, a rat maze, going from one little box to another little box and passing through passageways to get from one safe haven to another.

What is it that you most fear hearing about your work?

I found so-called great art too pompous, too stiff. What at this time was called minor art was freer, more imaginative, more open to all kinds of unorthodox expression, all kinds of daring in the handling of materials, and I preferred to surround myself with this type of art than with the great collectors' pieces. I had always in my mind that I was collecting for learning.

I have been back in Paris for two weeks. Nothing new. Life is still bitter.

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

It's pretentious to say, but my art is like a little Zen story, a story with a question mark at the end. People can take from it what they need. If somebody says, "Your art is very funny," I say, "You are totally right." If somebody says, "Your art is very sad," I say, "You are totally right." In Japan they say, "Your art is very Japanese, you even look Japanese.Your great-grandfather was most surely a Japanese man." And I say, "You are totally right."

It is in fact agreed that I am the plague, the cholera of the benevolent and generous men who are interested in art and that, when I show myself with my plasters, even the Emperor of the Sahara would flee.

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

Charity work is very important to me and gives me an opportunity to give back to my community. I've always been a big supporter of many different charities, have donated millions of dollars to them, and it just feels great to do and be able to help others, especially children.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.

If art is to flourish in the twenty-first century, it must renew its moral authority by rededicating itself to life. It must be an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization. It should be a majestic presence in everyday life just as it was in the past.