You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.
You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.
I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.
I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.
Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.
I have a book of buildings from 25,000 BC. These are huts built out of mammoth bones. These buildings were beautifully made, from the bones of the body into shelter.
The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.
But if you can find that spot - I suppose it's like running - I used to be a swimmer and swim laps, and you just have to be there with what you're doing.
An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.
I will listen to a beautiful person much more quickly than a plain person, and I have to learn to be nice to people who are not attractive looking.
I'm not the kind of artist who has an idea and then carries it out; it's more like I find what the idea was through doing the paintings.
I am in no mood to be deceived any longer by the crafty devil and false character whose greatest pleasure is to take advantage of everyone.
I took all my wax studies and threw them in the fire... that's the way it is when something unpleasant happens to me. I take my hammer and I squash a figure.
I found that part of it towards San Salvador extending from north to south five leagues, and the other side which we coasted along, ran from east to west more than ten leagues.
Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.
