Biomorphic Sculpture Quotes

It is a marble statue of a man with his children near him, and the man has such desperation on his face and the children at his feet appear to be clinging, begging him, while he gazes out toward the world with a tortured look, his hands pulling at his nouth, but his children look only at him, and when I finally saw this, I said inside myself, Oh.
I read the placard, which let me know that these children are offering themselves as food for their father, he is being starved to death in prison, and these children only want one thing - to have their father's distress disappear. They will allow him - oh, happily, happily - to eat them.
And I thought, So that guy knew. Meaning the sculptor. He knew.
And so did the poet who wrote what the sculpture has shown. He knew too. ~ Elizabeth Strout

It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture. ~ Louise Bourgeois

In the front room, a two-story flutter, love notes from the German Frau's first marriage barely tethered to a structure so it shifted in the wind, one tiny home movie projected on each. A sculpture of marriage, marriage come alive.
Lancelot felt tears start to his eyes. It was so exactly right. The Germans saw the gleam, and both of them--like budgerigars on their perch--sidled up and hugged Lancelot around the waist. ~ Lauren Groff

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology's? But no
anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the "women" Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

There is a primacy of each individual object. And we'll see! That's the whole point of making sculpture, to present a question in a physical form to people. ~ Lawrence Weiner

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance. ~ Wayne White

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks. ~ Carl Andre

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. ~ Joan Didion

My own acid-eating experience is limited in terms of total consumption, but widely varied as to company and circumstances ... and if I had a choice of repeating any one of the half dozen bouts I recall, I would choose one of those Hell's Angels parties in La Honda, complete with all the mad lighting, cops on the road, a Ron Boise sculpture looming out of the woods, and all the big speakers vibrating with Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." It was a very electric atmosphere. If the Angels lent a feeling of menace, they also made it more interesting ... and far more alive than anything likely to come out of a controlled experiment or a politely brittle gathering of well-educated truth-seekers looking for wisdom in a capsule. Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care. They just swallowed the stuff and hung on ... which is probably just as dangerous as the experts say, but a far, far nuttier trip than sitting in some sterile chamber with a condescending guide and a handful of nervous, would-be hipsters. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

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

You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thrity pages, minimum! I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing. A sculpture would also be acceptable. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy. Personally, I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh. ~ John Green

There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation. ~ Umberto Boccioni

A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot. ~ Samuel Johnson

The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitles, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?
[Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.] ~ John Adams

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions. ~ Paul Klee

I don't play the lottery. I don't care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they're doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don't understand why bridges aren't art. It seems to me they're penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that's a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it's infrastructure. That makes no sense. ~ Max Barry

You don't really see a muscle as a part of you, in a way. You see it as a thing. You look at it as a thing and you say well this thing has to be built a little longer, the bicep has to be longer; or the tricep has to be thicker here in the elbow area. And you look at it and it doesn't even seem to belong to you. Like a sculpture. Then after looking at it a sculptor goes in with his thing and works a little bit, and you do maybe then some extra forced reps to get this lower part out. You form it. Just like a sculpture. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

The fine arts are one of the most sensitive mirrors of society and culture of which they are an important part. What society and culture are, such will their fine arts be. If the culture is predominantly sensate, sensate also will be its dominant fine arts. If the culture is unintegrated, chaotic and eclectic also will be its fine arts. Since contemporary Western culture is predominantly sensate, and since the crisis consists in the disintegration of its dominant supersystem, so the contemporary crisis in the fine arts must also exhibit a desintegration of the sensate form of our painting and sculpture, music, literature, drama and architecture. ~ Pitirim Sorokin

The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure. ~ H.S. Ede

She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a Nigerian sculpture. She moved like a lioness, her every step bristling with suppressed violence. ~ Bonnie Greer

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

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

Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture. ~ Isamu Noguchi

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When sculpting the human figure in stone it is necessary to draw the whole form out of the content of the head. ~ Rudolf Steiner

There's a sculpture in our bedroom, a solid brass replica of Antonio's manhood. It's very expensive, he gave it to me as a romantic gift. ~ Melanie Griffith

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own. ~ Basil Bunting

We are late, Alexandra," said the dowager duchess as she stood in Alex's drawing room idly examining a magnificent fourteenth-century sculpture reposing on a satinwood table. "And I don't mind telling you, now that the time is upon us, I have a worse feeling about this now than I did earlier. And my instincts are never wrong. ~ Judith McNaught

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. ~ Camille Paglia

Architecture is inhabited sculpture. ~ Constantin Brancusi

His sculpture would have joy in it, try to capture the sense of fertility of Dionysus, the nature god, the power of the intoxicating drink that enabled a man to laugh and sing and forget for a while the sorrow of his earthly miseries. And then, perhaps, at the same time he could portray the decay that came with too much forgetfulness, that he saw all around him, when man surrendered his moral and spiritual values for the pleasures of the
flesh. The Bacchus would be the central figure of his theme, a human being rather than a demigod; then there would be a child of about seven, sweet-
faced, lovable, nibbling from a bunch of grapes. His composition would have death in it too; the tiger, who liked wine and was loved by Bacchus, with the deadest, dead skin and head conceivable ~ Irving Stone

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

I created an icicle sculpture in the snow. White on white. ~ Mary E. Pearson

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

Alexandros points to the bronze sculpture of Socrates. "His society didn't collapse because of an outside aggressor. It collapsed from within, from the complete breakdown of communication between citizens, and the breakdown of loving sentiment for one another. They ganged up and got rid of Socrates because he was an uncomfortable reminder of the glory days of ancient Athens, when /demokratia/--'people power'--reigned and citizens worked toward a greater good. He epitomized the fact that you're meant to stay open to all views, to all human experiences, because that's how you deepen your love for people and of wisdom. That amazing man sacrificed his life in the name of classic Athenian values of excellence and honor and compassion, so one day they might live on. And they did, here in America, for more than two centuries. I'm worried my beloved America is becoming as loveless as ancient Athens in its days of decline. ~ Christopher Phillips

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

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

I almost feel like it's an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure. ~ Andrew Stanton

I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance. ~ Sara Baume

The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up ... so the next stage is hard work ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves. ~ Pablo Picasso

I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art. ~ Santiago Calatrava

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital. ~ Anthony Caro