Martin Puryear Quotes

#1. The fire was followed by a period of grieving and then by an incredible lightness, freedom, and mobility.

Martin Puryear

#2. 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

#3. When I went to Africa I think that was when I really found a way to deal with what I had recently discovered; in two-dimensional terms, at least.

Martin Puryear

#4. I'm interested in vernacular cultures, where people lived a little closer to the source of materials and the making of objects for use. And for me, not to rely strictly on the history of art has always been an interesting process, to be looking into areas that we call craft and trades.

Martin Puryear

#5. The woman had thick plastic glasses and looked up at them, eyes large as eggs behind the lenses, and asked, "Jeez, who got murdered?

John Sandford

#6. The work is flowing from an inner knowing of how things really are.

Martin Puryear

#7. I felt it was part of the spirit of the whole program to do more than simply make an object.

Martin Puryear

#8. I was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure objects.

Martin Puryear

#9. By 1961, when I got my first copywriting job, 'my kind' were suddenly in demand. The creative revolution had begun. Advertising had turned into a business dominated by young, funny, Jewish copywriters and tough, sometimes violent, Greek and Italian art directors.

Jerry Della Femina

#10. I think of moving as a kind of saving grace.

Martin Puryear

#11. Why should we think that we wouldn't have a cross to carry? Are we somehow more deserving than our Lord?

Kevin DeYoung

#12. Highly successful people take immediate action on almost every item they encounter.

Kevin Kruse

#13. The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology.

Martin Puryear

#14. First tell the truth, then give your opinion.

Dennis Prager

#15. I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.

Bobbie Ann Mason

#16. I realized it wasn't necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting.

Martin Puryear

#17. Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

Martin Puryear

#18. Nothing about tomorrow was promised to them; Jamie understood that. But as long as God gave them the gift of today, she would cherish it with all her heart.

Karen Kingsbury

#19. There is the potential for much more spontaneity with prints than there is with the sculpture, which tends to be very slow, accretive kind of process-labor intensive.

Martin Puryear

#20. There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.

Martin Puryear