Sculpture Quotes - Page 5

• All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

  Basil Bunting

  What Matters, Jugs, Looks

  Basil Bunting (1999). “Basil Bunting on Poetry”

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• Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

  Donald Judd

  Art, Powerful, Space

  Donald Judd (2005). “Complete Writings 1959-1975: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints”, Halifax, N.S. : Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

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• Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Real, Literature

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• Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?

  Mavis Gallant

  Art, Life And Death, Asking

  "Mavis Gallant obituary" by Christopher Hawtree, www.theguardian.com. February 18, 2014.

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• I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.

  Georges Simenon

  Pieces, Woods, Novel

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

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• Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

  Robert Smithson

  Art, Architecture, Painting

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.42, Univ of California Press

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• In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Mind, Fancy

  1841 'Thoughts on Art', in The Dial, vol.1, no.3, Jan.

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• The ideal is to be obtained by selecting and assembling in one whole the beauties and perfections which are usually seen in different individuals, excluding everything defective or unseemly, so as to form a type or model of the species.

  William Fleming

  Perfection, Different, Individual

  William Fleming, Charles Porterfield Krauth (1860). “The Vocabulary of Philosophy, Mental, Moral and Metaphysical: With Quotations and References; for the Use of Students”, p.230

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• As when, O lady mine, With chiselled touch, The stone unhewn and cold, Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.

  Michelangelo

  Inspiration, Stones, Waste

  Michelangelo's sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna as quoted in Mrs. Henry Roscoe "Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems" (p. 169), 1868.

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• 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.

  Martin Puryear

  Art, Together, Way

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• Ideas were growing in all directions and dimensions; they were becoming a sculpture, or a castle. And then everyone left her, to return to their own affairs; and she was alone, and empty and unbelieving again.

  Kristin Cashore

  Ideas, Castles, Growing

  Kristin Cashore (2012). “Bitterblue”, p.311, Penguin

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• Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

  Aldous Huxley

  Wisdom, Silence, Bears

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• What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Space, Cohesion, Fats

  "Situations". Braziller, 1965.

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• If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.

  Banksy

  School, Past, Cities

  "Something to spray". Interview with Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. July 17, 2003.

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• Sculptors are obliged to follow the manners of the painters, and to make many ample folds, which are unsufferable hardness, and more like a rock than a natural garment.

  John Dryden

  Rocks, Natural, Manners

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• Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Mind, Details

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• Painters tend to ignore the challenges and thrills that sculptors enjoy daily - volume... like the perfect, imperfect voluminous oval of the egg.

  Sara Genn

  Eggs, Perfect, Challenges

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• And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public.

  Richard Serra

  Mean, Way, Chance

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• I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.

  Janet Echelman

  Art, School, College

  "Taking imagination seriously". TED Talk, www.ted.com. March 2011.

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• I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette) I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body

  Ana Mendieta

  Feelings, Female, Body

  Ana Mendieta, Gloria Moure, Donald Burton Kuspit (1997). “Ana Mendieta”

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• In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

  Peter Hedges

  Art, Lying, Giants

  Peter Hedges (1999). “What's Eating Gilbert Grape”, p.158, Simon and Schuster

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• There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.

  Julia Child

  Art, Four, Derivatives

  Julia Child, Alex Prud'homme (2006). “My Life in France”, p.145, Anchor

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• He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Humble, Desire, Triumph

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “Poems”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Simple, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.6, Courier Corporation

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• Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me.

  Charlie Rose

  Artist, Sculptors

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