A Quote by Nancy Lancaster

If every piece is perfect the room becomes a museum and lifeless. — © Nancy Lancaster
If every piece is perfect the room becomes a museum and lifeless.
I never think that sticking slavishly to one period is successful, a touch of nostalgia adds charm. One needs light and shade because if every piece is perfect the room becomes a museum and lifeless.
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
Have you ever had a moment where you finish a piece, and then all of a sudden the piece sort of takes on it's own life beyond you? It doesn't happen every time, but there are some pieces where that happens, and I love that. I feel like that's what I'm seeking nowadays, that moment of transcendence with a piece. Where this thing becomes larger than me as a person. It becomes otherworldly, and then I get separated as maker from it, and then it has it's own life. I love that.
If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.
Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.
In terms of collaboration, working on a new piece is always thrilling, as I'm sure most people would say, because the playwright is in the room and the piece itself evolves in response to what is happening in the room.
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
A woman's quest in life should be to find the perfect apartment. And I have found the perfect apartment. The perfect apartment is the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum. With a sofa.
When your home is perfect, every plant in place, every piece of furniture suits the space completely - you've completed a task.
There's room for Spike Lee's movies; there's room for Tyler Perry's movies. There's room for classics with an all black cast. There's room for all of it as long as we don't try to make any one piece define us as a race.
I have been criticized a lot for not looking perfect in every photograph. I'm not embarrassed about it. I'm proud of it. If I took perfect pictures all the time, the people standing in the room with me, or on the carpet, would think, 'What an actress! What a faker!'
The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.
When every action of yours is preceded by witnessing, then every move you make in this world becomes perfect and significant.
This is not a museum of tragedy. It is not the museum of difficult moments. It is the museum that says -here is a balanced history of America that allows us to cry and smile.
If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once the initial design is there, the formula kicks in. Each room should have something unique and different about it - much the same way that in a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced.
I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.
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