Art Sculpture Quotes

#1. I don't want to make plop art - sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture.

Rachel Whiteread

#2. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

Clement Greenberg

#3. He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me ..

Jonathan Safran Foer

#4. To give life to sculpture I found it must have a pulse, a breathing quality that could change in a flash, and it must never appear static, hard, or unrevealing. All these demands formed themslves in my thoughts, and became like an endless obsession.

Malvina Hoffman

#5. The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry.

Marie-Antoine Careme

#6. With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art.

Janine Antoni

#7. Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

Barnett Newman

#8. If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

#9. I am a she. The mask is a he, or is actually gender-neutral. People love the character.

K. Guillory

#10. 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.

Louise Bourgeois

#11. Whatever your life's pursuit
art, poetry, sculpture, music, whatever your occupation may be
you can be as spiritual as clergy, always living a life of praise.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#12. The statues carved here may be viewed as fragments of consciousness itself, or the residue of violent emotions

Linda Lappin

#13. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect ... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#14. Sculpture may be almost anything: a monument, a statue, an old coin, a bas-relief, a portrait bust, a lifelong struggle against heavy odds.

Malvina Hoffman

#15. I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.

Mary Ann Shaffer

#16. The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt

Christian Boltanski

#18. I feel like I became an artist by default. I went to art college, but my interest was always more towards film than painting or sculpture.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#19. A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone ... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

Hans Arp

#20. Sculpture is an art of the open air ... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.

Henry Moore

#21. Throughout the Middle Ages, art and architecture had a spiritual mission: to direct man's attention toward God. Churches soared in that direction, and sculpture and paintings pointed the way to paradise. They depicted the sufferings of Christ, the Apostles, martyrs, the Last Judgment, and so on.

Jesse Bryant Wilder

#22. Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Roy Blount Jr.

#23. A piece of art - this goes for a painting or a sculpture or a book or whatever - really shouldn't have to do with the set of expectations that the viewer or the audience or the reader brings to that work. It should just have to do with how they interpret it and whether they like it or not.

Max Kellerman

#24. The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

Louis L'Amour

#25. 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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#26. Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick or whatever. In sculpture you can get a rock. Writing you just need a pencil and paper.

Forest Whitaker

#27. Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight ... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty.

Stephanie Mills

#28. Interfacing street sculpture in public space creates an installation environment that turns regular space into art space. Signs and people and everything around a street sculpture-they all become part of it. A two-dimensional work, being confined to surfaces, doesn't have as much of a capacity.

Mark Jenkins

#29. The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.

Alan Watts

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Prose is an art form, movies and acting in general are art forms, so is music, painting, graphics, sculpture, and so on. Some might even consider classic games like chess to be an art form. Video games use elements of all of these to create something new. Why wouldn't video games be an art form?

Sam Lake

#33. There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through

Dan Rice

#34. Without art; without paintings, books, sculpture and music, the human soul would be quite impenetrable, don't you think?

Jonathan Hull

#35. I love to draw-pencil, ink pen-I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England-you know those huge paintings?-I'm just amazed. You don't think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.

Michael Jackson

#36. The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

#37. I assert that the art of sculpture, among all the arts connected with design, is at least seven times greater than any other, for the following reason: why, sir, a statue of true sculpture ought to have seven points of view, which ought all to boast equal excellence.

Benvenuto Cellini

#38. Just stop worrying about it," she said quietly. "Just let the stone be what it wants to be. You can't control everything, you know.

Danika Stone

#39. I love reality TV and everything, and it's something that I truly love to do, and I love the outcome of it; it's like my art. I consider my reality show as my art piece, and it's like a sculpture that I built; it's my baby.

Kendra Wilkinson

#40. And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.

Richard Bach

#41. 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.

Marco Brambilla

#42. These days I am obsessed by sculpture! I believe I have glimpsed a complete renovation of that mummified art.

Umberto Boccioni

#43. If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!

Orson Welles

#44. Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Harold Rosenberg

#45. The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality-something approaching the work of God.

D.T. Suzuki

#46. You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Henri Matisse

#47. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#48. I created an icicle sculpture in the snow. White on white.

Mary E. Pearson

#49. Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.

James Howell

#50. 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

#51. 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.

Wayne White

#52. Where the material ends, art begins.

Etienne Hajdu

#53. Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

David Josiah Brewer

#54. I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art.

Janet Echelman

#55. Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.

Thomas Hoving

#56. 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

#57. All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.

Jacques Lipchitz

#58. The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.

Marie-Antoine Careme

#59. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

Michelangelo

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

Ezra Pound

#61. Until it's not clear if he's making the sculpture or if the sculpture is making him.

Jandy Nelson

#62. Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

Jerry Saltz

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

Robert Smithson

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

Damien Hirst

#65. 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

#66. I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.

Santiago Calatrava

#67. Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.

Jan Tschichold

#68. The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

#69. With Michelangelo anatomical science is transformed into music. With him the human body is architectonic matter for the construction of dreams.

Umberto Boccioni

#70. I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.

Benvenuto Cellini

#71. Music is an expression of individuality; it's how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there - express it - whether it's sculpture, dance or singing.

David Sanborn

#72. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.

Michael Kimmelman

#73. Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn't get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality.

Ben Lerner

#74. It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Tom Stoppard

#75. Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

Alexander Calder

#76. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

James Freeman Clarke

#77. 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.

Paul Outerbridge

#78. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.

Sol LeWitt

#79. Every model is a living sculpture - art in-vivo.

Stephane Rolland

#80. Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

Auguste Rodin

#81. In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.

Edward J. Fraughton

#82. 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.

Gregory Crewdson

#83. Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.

Vincent Van Gogh

#84. The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

J.G. Holland

#85. Well, I never studied design and I went to art school to study art, you know, sculpture and things like that, and ended up making things like sculpture and started making chairs and jewelry together and that's how I started.

Marc Newson

#86. Whatever art--writing, painting, sculpture, acting, dance, music, or any other--there will be frustration & travails. It's all worth it

Mark Rubinstein

#87. Bicycles are pieces of art. You get that combination of kinetic engineering, but then, besides the welds, the paint jobs, the kind of the sculpture of it all is quite beautiful. Bikes have such great lines, and all different styles.

Robin Williams

#88. 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

#89. When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination.

Moses Mendelssohn

#90. 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

#91. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#92. A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.

Michelangelo

#93. But, as sculpture and painting are gifts of God, what I insist on is, that both shall be used purely and lawfully, that gifts which the Lord has bestowed upon us, for His glory and our good, shall not be preposterously abused, nay, shall not be perverted to our destruction.

John Calvin

#94. I'd always wanted to tell people that when I work on my body I'm thinking about classical sculpture, so I jumped at the chance to show off body building as an art form.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#95. Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

Ben Shahn

#96. Then sculpture and her sister arts revived; stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live.

Alexander Pope

#97. As Henry Moore carved
or modelled his sculpture every day,
he strove to surpass Donatello
4. and failed, but woke the next morning
elated for another try.

Donald Hall

#98. Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

Pablo Picasso

#99. When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.

Chuck Close

#100. There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it.

John Lennon