Artist Quotes

But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result.

Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

If to the viewer's eyes, my world appears less beautiful than his, I'm to be pitied and the viewer praised.

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.

Damn everything but the circus.

Love the moment and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

Flowers grow out of dark moments.

Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed.

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.

My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

It's the role of the artist to pursue content.

If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.

I, in the end, make art for myself.

I've nothing to say.

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

I feel there's everything to do yet.