Henry Moore
Turner - whether on canvas or paper - can create almost measurable distances of space and air - air that you can draw, in which you can work out what the section through it would be. The space he creates is not emptiness; it is filled with 'solid' atmosphere.Collection: Space
I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'.Collection: New
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.Collection: Art
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.Collection: Art
Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.Collection: Nature
The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.
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.
Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.
I believe that nothing should be taboo - no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to a discovery.
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.
In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor.
The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.
Since the Gothic, European sculpture has become overgrown with moss, weeds - all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.
The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.
To know one thing, you must know the opposite.
Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn't like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.
In Giacometti's work, the armature has once again become the life-line of the sculpture, and also, he's brought back to sculpture a nervous sensitivity which the 'pure carving' side of sculpture can lose sight of altogether.
The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.
Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.
Everything I do is intended to be big.
I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.
I was the seventh in the family. By the time I came along, one brother and two sisters had already become teachers, and this was the sort of path carved out for the rest of the family.
I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.
So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.
There are universal shapes to which everybody is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.
Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.Collection: Art
Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.Collection: Mean
In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture.Collection: Animal
If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.Collection: Art
To be an artist is to believe in life.Collection: Life
The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.Collection: Art
All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.Collection: Art
I would like my work to be thought of as a celebration of life and nature.Collection: Celebration
One never knows what each day is going to bring. The important thing is to be open and ready for it.Collection: Important
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.Collection: Spiritual
The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.Collection: Artist
I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.Collection: Art
The important thing is somehow to begin.Collection: Important
I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.Collection: Drawing
Sculpture is an art of the open air... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.Collection: Beautiful
Being an artist is celebrating life.Collection: Passion
Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.Collection: Helping Others
The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.Collection: Life
Art is a continuous activity with no separation between past and present.Collection: Art
The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation.Collection: Art
You must always be open to your luck. You cannot force it, but you can recognize it.Collection: Luck
Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.Collection: Art
If an artist tries consciously to do something to others, it is to stretch their eyes, their thoughts, to something they would not see or feel if the artist had not done it. To do this, he has to stretch his own first.Collection: Communication
I have always been very interested in landscape... I find that all natural forms are a source of unending interest - tree trunks, the growth of branches from the trunk, each finding its own individual air-space.Collection: Space
Our knowledge of shape and form remains, in general, a mixture of visual and of tactile experiences... A child learns about roundness from handling a ball far more than from looking at it.Collection: Children