Home / Topics / Sculpture Quotes

Sculpture Quotes

Browse 500 quotes about Sculpture.

Sculpture Quotes

“I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.”

Thinking Middle Objects Painting Sculpture

Author:Michael Craig-Martin

“A lot of people don't realize the roots of Batman are really Latino. They don't go back to the bat god, the ones the Mayans had - they had one that was a "bat man," they had sculptures of him, literally they had bats down there - but the other, more relatively recent inspiration for Batman was Zorro. But Zorro was based on the California bandits. Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburico Vásquez.”

People Men Inspiration Realizing Roots California Bats Sculpture Latino Bandits Zorro Mayans

Author:Luis Valdez

“Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone, Can nature show as fair?”

Soul Shows Form Fairs Sculpture Sculptors

Book:Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)

“Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.”

Ifs Thinking Wells Art Moments Might Groups Conditions Century Figures Taste Greek Composition Sculpture Fragments Vivid Adapted Antiques Revulsion Delphi

Book:The nude: a study in ideal form

Source: The nude: a study in ideal form

“Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.”

Knows Pieces Stones Finished Not Sure Sculpture Chipping Away

Author:Robert Altman

“I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.”

Needs Writing Pages Size Construction Dozen Sculpture Edits

Author:Grant Morrison

“In New York, I'm playing in a church, solo, doing instrumental stuff. There's talk of doing more, like, installation-type things with some of the specimen horns I've played through. Just filling a room in a museum with these horn-speaker sculptures and then making loops that run all day, and you walk around the room and sort of mix the sound by where you stand. That's all way in the future, but that kind of stuff is a different way of thinking about performing.”

“It's a stage with four lights clamped to it with walls made out of plywood. And then my name's in the center. It's the type of thing that can be made over and over again. It's not like a Michelangelo sculpture.”

Made Light Names Four Stage Wall Type Sculpture

Author:Josh Smith

“[I have a] way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. [...] I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.”

Way Firsts Stories Objects Narrative Sculpture

Author:Matthew Barney

“Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.”

Art Worry Painting Logical Poetic Gravity Sculpture Sculptors Sculpting

Author:Damien Hirst

“Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?”

I Can Photograph Sculpture

Author:Constantin Brancusi

“I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment.”

Thinking Sleep Environment Response Sculpture

Author:Andy Goldsworthy

“I didn't grow up in a naked household, but nudity was not a taboo thing. My mother was an artist and there were naked sculptures and paintings all over the place.”

Mother Artist Grows Growing Up Painting Naked Household Sculpture Taboo Nudity

Author:Ingrid Michaelson

“I wish I could play music. I think I get as closeas possible with the editing of the films. Over the years musichas been an even more important influence than-or as important as-film.There's no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture-it'sall in cinema.”

Thinking Years Important Play Film Wish Doubt Influence Movement Painting Cinema No Doubt Editing Sculpture

Author:Martin Scorsese

“In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.”

Art Ideas Past Goal Emotion Art Is Seeking Sculpture Exorcism

Book:Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997

Source: Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997

“A sculpture is something that if it falls on your foot, it will break it.”

Ifs Fall Break Feet Sculpture

Author:John Chamberlain

“I think circumstance plays a big part in terms of what I do. For example, if I wasn't ever able to show in an art gallery I probably wouldn't really make very much sculpture. But I've had the opportunity to show in big spaces, so I want to fill up that space in the same way you might want to fill up a page.”

Ifs Thinking Way Want Art Play Shows Bigs Might Able Opportunity Term Space Example Circumstances Pages Sculpture Gallery Art Galleries

Author:David Shrigley

“First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a sculpture.”

Thinking Way Want Mind Firsts Moving Labels Sculpture Puppets

Author:Wayne White

“Art should be as inclusive as possible. That's why I like bringing the low form of puppetry and elevating it into a sculpture form, but it's still a puppet also.”

Should Art Stills Form Lows Sculpture Puppets Elevating

Author:Wayne White

“I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.”

Thinking Way Needs Should Art Ideas Play Artist Break Painting Pure Art Is Performances Breaking Down Sculpture Advise Pretension

Author:Wayne White

“I like the little chess match of how people move through space. I'm not comparing myself to Michelangelo with this analogy, but he said when he sculpts it's like finding the sculpture within. It feels that way when you are with actors, too. There's a natural way to do this with a natural language that flows and feels like real people talking. And you've just got to find it. So I enjoy that part of the process.”

People Way Feels Littles Said Real Moving Actors Language Process Enjoy Natural Space Talking Findings Flow Chess Compare Sculpture Analogies People Talking Chess Match

Author:Timothy Miller

“Like in the paintings, there has to be moments that are completely right to be able to feel how wrong it is when the space gets flattened or the space collapses. It's the same with the technique in the sculptures: for some to feel really wrong, you have to have parts be really right.”

Feels Moments Able Space Painting Technique Collapse Sculpture

Author:Francesca DiMattio

“The plane as an object has been a huge effort to make. It is a sculpture, a technological invention, a piece of aviation culture. But really, it only exists to be inserted into a variety of landscapes, to be a catalyst, to offset them.”

Has Beens Culture Effort Pieces Objects Huge Invention Variety Landscape Planes Aviation Technological Sculpture Catalyst

Author:Aleksandra Mir

“All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And theres only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.”

Way Ideas Ends Shapes One Way Sculpture Wire Loops

Book:The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air

Source: The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air

“Photography is not easy. You know it takes a painter or a sculpture or a musician years to perfect their technique. Then they're free to make an expression in a matter of moments. It takes moments for a photographer to perfect his technique. And then it takes years for him to make it into something that is truly creative and worthwhile.”

Knows Years Matter Moments Easy Perfect Creative Expression Photography Musician Photographer Technique Painter Worthwhile Sculpture

Author:Paul Caponigro

“Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.”

Men Art Used Passion Objects Painting Music Is Architecture Contemplation Sculpture Man And Nature

Book:The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria

Source: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria

“Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.”

Ifs Art Made Found Chance Creation Objects Ready Mass Separation Fountain Sculpture Items Miraculous Commonplace Abolish Art And Life Found Objects

Author:Charles Simic

“First of all, I love women. But I lust after beautiful women in the way that I lust after a beautiful piece of sculpture - this will probably get me in trouble - or a beautiful car. I believe everyone's on a sliding scale of sexuality. There are moments where I am sexually attracted to women. But it doesn't overpower my first impulse; my lust for them is the same as my lust for beauty in all things.”

Way Firsts Believe Moments Beautiful I Believe Pieces Trouble Car All Things Sexuality Scales Lust Impulse Sculpture Beautiful Women Sexually

Author:Tom Ford

“I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.”

People Bigs Artist Building Painting Construction More Money Sculpture

Book:Andy Warhol: the late work

Source: Andy Warhol: the late work

“What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.”

Trying Doe Spiritual Sound Realizing Doubt Stones Treats Patterns Conviction Woods Impulse Planes Sculpture Sequence Polish Mold Lyrical Craftsman Fugue

Author:Dylan Thomas

“Baroque sculpture and interior design has a quality of creating an environment that seems organic because it's full of curves and details, like a forest.”

Seems Quality Environment Design Creating Details Forests Interiors Curves Sculpture Interior Design Baroque

Author:Camille Henrot

“I like to make sculpture because it makes my life social. When I make drawings, I work alone. When I work with sculpture I have someone I can work with.”

I Can Social Drawing Sculpture

Author:Camille Henrot

“The durational aspect of video art is very different from photography or sculpture. The idea of looping things interferes with that a little bit. It eliminates that finite viewing period which I think is not so expressive sometimes.”

Thinking Littles Art Ideas Different Sometimes Bits Periods Photography Little Bit Art Is Aspect Video Interfere Finite Sculpture Expressive

Author:Marco Brambilla

“A good sculpture can be rolled downhill without breaking.”

Author:Michelangelo

“I think about my art works as paintings, because they refer to the history of painting. I also have to think about them as sculptures, because every part of the process is part of the project. They're sculptures because they play on the idea of what should be hanging in a gallery. In that sense they're also kind of ready-mades.”

Thinking Should Kind Art Made Ideas Play Process Painting Ready Projects Sculpture Gallery

Author:Cory Arcangel

“You can't make a sculpture until you've got a lump of rock.”

Rocks Sculpture Lumps

Author:Eran Creevy

“Sex divorced from love, instead of raising man by taking him away from himself, drags him down to the hall of mirrors where he is always confronted with self. Sex does not care about the person, but about the act. The fig leaf which once was put over the secret parts of man and woman in sculpture is now put over the face. The person does not matter.”

Men Persons Doe Self Matter Care Faces Sex Secret Men And Women Mirrors Halls Drag Leafs Sculpture Divorced Figs

Author:Fulton J. Sheen

“Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.”

Feels Writing Trying Different Hard Feelings Bigs Novel Crazy Longing Wounds Contact Things To Do Psychics Sculpture Primal Hard Things

Author:Lev Grossman

“The greatest piece of acting or music or sculpture or what-have-you always has its roots in the truth of human emotion.”

Humans Acting Emotion Pieces Roots Sculpture Human Emotions

Book:Sanford Meisner on Acting

Source: Sanford Meisner on Acting

“I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)”

Ifs Men Believe Wells Can Do Lines Knowing Photography Photograph Squares Inches Believe In Me Sculpture Acid

Author:John Ruskin

“Is as if the music is another character or as if it was a part of this great opera. I also through about this project as a structure or as a sculpture made out of colors, rhythm, characters, and brush strokes, but with every single one of these always supporting one another.”

Ifs Made Character Color Projects Music Is Structure Rhythm Opera Strokes Brushes Sculpture Brush Strokes

Author:Alex Abreu

“If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.”

Ifs Way Years Has Beens Two Might Born Photography Hundred Years Ago Sculpture Might Have Been Sculptors

Book:Robert Mapplethorpe: the perfect moment

Source: Robert Mapplethorpe: the perfect moment

“If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work.”

Ifs Different Real Purpose Concern Photograph Scales Passing Passings Planes Flats Consumption Sculpture Reducing Passing On

Book:Richard Serra, Interviews, Etc., 1970-1980

Source: Richard Serra, Interviews, Etc., 1970-1980

“It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.”

People Way Want Painting Photograph Sculpture

Author:Richard Serra

“... photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches.”

“Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.”

Two Seems Past Media Particular Painting Photography Performances Leaving Decades Boundaries Mediums Sculpture Over The Past

Book:Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

Source: Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

“Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.”

Art Reason Moving Culture Information Painting Photography Democratic Sculpture Back And Forth Installation

Author:Gregory Crewdson

“I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.”

World Art Done Feelings Eye Form Growing Progress Modern Painting Photography Related Sculpture Tempo Modern Science Best Art

Book:Paul Outerbridge, Jr: photographs

Source: Paul Outerbridge, Jr: photographs

“When I put the camera back to my eye, I noticed a particular guardsman pointing at me. I said, "I'll get a picture of this," and his rifle went off. And almost simultaneously, as his rifle went off, a halo of dust came off a sculpture next to me, and the bullet lodged in a tree. I dropped my camera in the realization that it was live ammunition. I don't know what gave me the combination of innocence and stupidity... but I never took cover.”

Knows Said States Eye Next Tree Students Particular Cameras Stupidity Dust Realization Innocence Combination Shooting Bullets Sculpture Pointing April Rifles Ammunition Halos Kent

Author:John Filo

“When a sculptor creates a sculpture, a writer writes a novel, or a painter paints a motif on a canvas, he needs talent and expertise. But to be successful in his endeavor, he also needs to have the passionate feeling that he wants, at all costs, to create a work of art which, in his head, constantly demands to be accomplished. The same also applies to developing board games or card games.”