Robert Irwin Quotes

To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.

It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.

In the realm of the phenomenal, "less is more" only when less is the sum total of more.

There's no palette as rich as a garden. And the intensity of it - I make this statement all the time: You can't plan nature; you court her.

For the next week, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you've already done the first and most critical thing, you've honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you've actually changed the world.

It's a constant, continuous, spectacular world we live in, and every day you see things that just knock you out, if you pay attention.

Gardening always has been an art, essentially.

If I hold up a red square for 30 seconds and take it away, you will see a perfect green square. It's how the eye works. So if you want to paint a really good red painting, you have to strategically place in some green, so the eye is brought back.

Every time you do something, make something, it's final in a way, but it's not. It immediately raises a great set of questions. And if you become a question addict, which I am, you immediately have something you need to pursue.

We actually form the world at every instant, although we're not cognitively aware of that but - and there are people would argue with that to some degree.

If you wanted to watch me work, it would be totally boring. It would look like a Warhol film where nothing happens. I sit for 24 hours, then I scratch myself.

I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.

When you walk into a room, you assess it instantaneously, habitually, before you're even aware of it. I mean, you make sure there's not a hole you're going to fall into, but mostly you're not even aware of what you're thinking.

Every situation has qualities. Essentially, we quantify them and that's the practical side of our lives, so the involvement with perception and in acquiring the perception is our ability to understand qualities. They exist only as long as a human being keeps them in play. They're - Therefore they are akin to energy.