Barbara Hepworth Quotes

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

Barbara Hepworth

#2. 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

#3. I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

Barbara Hepworth

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Body experience ... is the centre of creation.

Barbara Hepworth

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Barbara Hepworth

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

Barbara Hepworth

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

Barbara Hepworth

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Barbara Hepworth

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

Barbara Hepworth

#17. 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