I'm very grateful that I was too poor to get to art school until I was 21. ... I was old enough when I got there to know how to get something out of it.
There is nothing greater than enthusiasm.
The important thing is somehow to begin.
What's important is finding out what works for you.
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.
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.
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.
Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.
I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor.
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.
