Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors - Page 8

As a kid, I lived in a fantasy world. I used to believe ants could talk. Not once did they say thank you.

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 like the idea of watching the sun go down in the ocean. I've always felt comfortable about that, I like sunsets. There's something about a westward movement that seems fascinating, although the Irish refer to going West as a metaphor for dying. I see it differently.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

I think you have to teach kids to work, and you can only teach them to work if you work... I can't delegate jobs if I'm not doing it.

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.

When I was doing Professor Albert Einstein's bust he had many a jibe at the Nazi professors, one hundred of whom had condemned his theory of relativity in a book. 'Were I wrong,' he said, 'one professor would have been enough.

My single-minded aim is to give existence to fantasy.

I no longer identify myself as Japanese or American but a 'citizen of the universe.'

There is nothing so beautiful as the free forest. To catch a fish when you are hungry, cut the boughs of a tree, make a fire to roast it, and eat it in the open air, is the greatest of all luxuries. I would not stay a week pent up in cities if it were not for my passion for art.

When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.

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.

In science we see progress. In art there is no progress. In art the questions have always been the same. From the beginning of time till now, we are always asking the same questions. There are very few. We are looking for God, we are asking why we die, we are contemplating sex and the beauty of nature. The only thing that changes is that, in each period of questioning, we speak with the language of our time.

And to remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt, because that's what new year's all about, getting another chance, a chance to forgive. to do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about what if and start embracing what will be. so when that ball drops at midnight, and it will drop, let's remember to be nice to each other, kind to each other, and not just tonight but all year long.

If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.

I feel as if they are somewhere between movement and stillness, and thus in possession of a certain energy.

Until I was twelve years old, I led this wandering life, fishing, swimming, and making moccasins.

Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.

My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.

Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy.

The hand has the richest articulation of space.

We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.

I have drawn all my life, I don't know how to live without drawing.

I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.

I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.

If people think of public art as something the public decides, it's impossible to make anything of substance.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

Early on I saw the plastic quality in colored people and had friends among them; and later was to work from colored models and friends, including Paul Robeson, whose splendid head I worked from in New York. I tried to draw Chinamen in their quarter, but the Chinese did not like being drawn and would immediately disappear when they spotted me.

There are infinite modes of expression in the world of art, and to insist that only by one road can the artist attain his ends is to limit him.

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

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.

In Paris, I met a young American person who immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that had directed my forces. Throughout my career as an artist, I refer to this person by the word 'Woman.'

I don't like to think about being an influence. It's embarrassing.

A pun, like champagne, loses its sparkle when too long drawn out. Its flash is its savor.

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

I was shooting at myself - I was shooting my own violence and the violence of the times

I would like to continue being radical. As you get older, some of the world catches up and it's passed you. In the '60s you were on the crest of a wave because you were part of the wave. I don't want be a stick in the mud and do the same thing as I did last year, I want to do something different and see what happens.

The world has been experiencing a whole pattern of auto-destruction, whether in environmental disasters like Chernobyl or health disasters like AIDS.

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.

The creation of rule is more creative than the destruction of them. Creation demands a higher level of reasoning and draws connections between cause and effect. The best rules are never stable or permanent, but evolve naturally according to context or need.

Art and life are inseparable.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

If a nonartist teaches a subject called art, it is nonart.

Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life.

I can’t understand it when people say they don’t like a particular color. . . . How on earth can you not like a color?

I wanted to make some of the really important things of my generation and some of the biggest.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Withersoever the wheel of Fortune turns, Virtue stands firm upon her feet.

I don't want to say anything because I know I am unable to protect you from the harm that I see.

I used to unwind the wire tags that labeled the crates of vegetables and took the fine brass and steel wires and braided and twisted them together to make bracelets, rings, and figures.

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.

The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences. No one can say that the O’s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl’s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.

A necessary process for the artist is one which begins with a point of view, a reaction to the environment, to people, to whatever it is one is concerned with.

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao looks like a great adventure.