Richard Artschwager Quotes

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.

I always like to talk about how important space is. Art is in the spaces. Anybody can sing a note; it takes an artist to sing the spaces. Anybody can paint a brushstroke; it takes an artist to know when not to put the brushstroke.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Colour is the touch of the eye, Music to the deaf, A word out of darkness.

Although the poet has as wide a choice of subjects as the painter, his creations fail to afford as much satisfaction to mankind as do paintings... if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense.

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

I find it difficult to breathe when l'm in the space. There seems to be no oxygen. I want to put people into a situation where they're sensitive to themselves watching the piece.

A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.

When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because "moon atoms" penetrate my eye.

I like being behind the camera because I can control perception and what people see.

The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention.

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it.