Isamu Noguchi Quotes

#1. I learned the tricks ... If you want to do academic things, you can do them. It is not difficult. Yet it is from this difficulty - the mistakes and dead ends - that artists develop, not through the quick solutions and not from something you learn and apply.

Isamu Noguchi

#2. Appreciate the moment.

Isamu Noguchi

#3. The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.

Isamu Noguchi

#4. When the time came for me to work with larger spaces, I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.

Isamu Noguchi

#5. It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness ...

Isamu Noguchi

#6. Art should become as one with its surroundings.

Isamu Noguchi

#7. I am always learning, always discovering.

Isamu Noguchi

#8. You can find out how to do something and then do it or do something and then find out what you did.

Isamu Noguchi

#9. The attractions of ceramics lie partly in its contradictions. It is both difficult and easy, with an element beyond our control. It is both extremely fragile and durable. Like 'Sumi' ink painting, it does not lend itself to erasures and indecision.

Isamu Noguchi

#10. Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.

Isamu Noguchi

#11. In my work, I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever.

Isamu Noguchi

#12. Brancusi made me realise that what I had learned previously - the quick ways of doing things - was all wrong. It is a search you have to enter - into yourself.

Isamu Noguchi

#13. To order space is to give it meaning.

Isamu Noguchi

#14. When an artist stops being a child, he stops being an artist.

Isamu Noguchi

#15. The best is that which is most spontaneous or seemingly so.

Isamu Noguchi

#16. The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature.

Isamu Noguchi

#17. For me it is the direct contact of artist to material which is original, and it is the earth and his contact to it which will free him of the artificiality of the present and his dependence on industrial products.

Isamu Noguchi

#18. I perceive my limitations even as I work. There are times when I see nothing but restrictions, barriers. Learning takes time.

Isamu Noguchi

#19. We are a landscape of all we have seen

Isamu Noguchi