Barbara Hepworth Quotes

• I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Art, Body, Draws

  Barbara Hepworth (Dame), Alan Bowness (1967). “Drawings from a sculptor's landscape”

  58 Copy quote

• I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour

  Barbara Hepworth

  Form, Thrust, Hollow

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1970). “A Pictorial Autobiography”

  22 Copy quote

• All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Art, Memories, Father

  Barbara Hepworth (Dame) (1978). “A pictorial autobiography”

  26 Copy quote

• It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

  Barbara Hepworth

  People, Sculpture, Body

  Interview in The Studio, 1962.

  28 Copy quote

• My works are an imitation of my own past and present.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Art, Past, Imitation

  18 Copy quote

• Body experience... is the centre of creation.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Art, Body, Creation

  11 Copy quote

• The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Artist, Thinking, Community

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1970). “A Pictorial Autobiography”

  26 Copy quote

• I have gained very great inspiration from the Cornish land- and seascape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one's sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Country, Moving, Inspiration

  "Voicing Our Visions: Writings by Women Artists". Book by Mara R. Witzling, 1991.

  27 Copy quote

• I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Form, Impulse, Clear

  18 Copy quote

• I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you're professional or you're not.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Midnight, Found

  21 Copy quote

• Before I start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say 'almost' because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor's ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea; the point being that the material has vitality - it resists and makes demands.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Integrity, Ideas, Intuition

  "The Studio 132:643". as cited in Voicing our visions, - "Writings by women artists", ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York 1991, p. 279, 1946.

  25 Copy quote

• I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Block, Sheep, Yards

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1970). “A Pictorial Autobiography”

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Principles, Sculpture, Passionate

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1970). “A Pictorial Autobiography”

  16 Copy quote

• My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Thinking, Hands, Stones

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1970). “A Pictorial Autobiography”

  29 Copy quote

• At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Art, Men, Wish

  24 Copy quote

• [My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .

  Barbara Hepworth

  Past, Emotional, Creative

  20 Copy quote

• One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Yield, Details, Tiny

  14 Copy quote

• I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Order, Space, Different

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1952). “Carvings and Drawings”

  10 Copy quote

• Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize... ...It is essentially practical and passionate.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Sight, Land, Ideas

  Studio International 171, p.280, June 1966.

  13 Copy quote

• Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Men, Primitive Man, Drawing

  Studio International 171, p. 280, June 1966.

  15 Copy quote

• Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Yield, Hybridity, Produce

  18 Copy quote

• The United Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Succeed, Failing, United Nations

  Dame Barbara Hepworth (1970). “A Pictorial Autobiography”

  11 Copy quote

• My left hand is my thinking hand (image), my right hand my doing hand (sequence).

  Barbara Hepworth

  Thinking, Hands, Left Hand

  12 Copy quote

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