Sculptor Quotes

I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment.

The great artist is conscious of the talent and power he possesses otherwise he would not see his faults and so would not be able to improve.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

If all creation rests upon a passion, it is for me also an act of love and an attempt to discover in myself an inner world.

Constantine Andreou

You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture... The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.

People like me, who care about printing, constitute the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation.

It will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing.

Umberto Boccioni

I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.

Louise Bourgeois

Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.

One can pass on responsibility, but not the discretion that goes with it.

Benvenuto Cellini

There is always something missing that torments me.

Camille Claudel

What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

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.

Mixed feelings when he [Max Ernst frequently writes about himself in the third person] enters the forest for the first time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke of as 'being at one with Nature'. Wonderful joy in breathing freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and trapped.

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

In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson's work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson's work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.

Edward Allington

Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist. A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

Barbara Hepworth

Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.

In this unexpected scenario, the UFO occupants — despite their obvious technological superiority — are desperate for both human genetic material and the ability to feel human emotions — particularly maternal emotions. Unlikely though it may seem, it is possible that the very survival of these extraterrestrials depends upon their success in absorbing chemical and psychological properties received from human abductees.

The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems.

Edward Ihnatowicz

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

Ellsworth Kelly

Why have our standards fallen so low? Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. There are no longer any natural constraints which depend on materials such as wood and stone. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but if I were to accept this business of conceptual art I would have no reason to exist.

Jannis Kounellis

Sculpture is the essence of things, the essence of nature, that which is perpetually human.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck

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.

Jacques Lipchitz