Jessica Stockholder Quotes

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

Sculpture is an art of the open air... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.

You know, I don't really understand a suburban environment. I want to be out in the woods, I want to be where it's wild, I want to wake up and hear birds, I want to walk outside and see a gaggle of turkeys bouncing across my lawn - I want to be someplace like that - or I want to be right in the middle of an urban environment.

We share a wonderful, I think, physical or geographical heritage.

I think it's really important to use your hands and get close to materials. To be up close to real things like rain and mud; to have contact with nature.

When it comes to Washington, most people tend to think first of politics. But Washington is also a geographic and physical place. It is, for instance, one of the few cities of the world where you can talk endlessly about trees.

The earth is a beautiful planet.

One of the reasons I stay in New York is because you're always around so many other types of arts, and it's easy to just get lost in it.

In traditional cities like Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, nature was a very important part of urban planning - not only as a landscape but a part of daily life.

In the beginning, I was truly trying to take what I felt when I was in a field or in an outdoor space and directly translate it into the music.

I love outdoor places in the evenings; I don't like box-like clubs.

Fundamentally, I am all about finding interesting and authentic ways to incorporate nature into most of my designs.

We may have city lights and the glow of touch screens to obscure our view, but God's world is still near at hand, even right here in New York City where I live.

I think there's something about a sylvan setting; you want grass and nature with outdoor Shakespeare.

Everything does come from nature. That's where you get new ideas. Just draw the landscape. I felt doing it with a bit of burnt wood was also good because I was drawing burnt wood with a piece of wood. I wanted to do black and white. After using color, I thought black and white would be good. You can have color in black and white. There is color in them, actually.

Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.

Like the Impressionists, I enjoy the effects of light, and especially natural light on the figure. If I could, I would take each viewer along to my favorite places along the seacoasts or in the mountains to the secret places of nature.

My inspiration came from the land, ... and, of course, from Paul Klee . . . and the poetics of his paintings.

For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.

Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings: climb with me the steep,-- Nature's observatory--whence the dell, In flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.

When the magic hour arrives, my thoughts center on light rather than on the landscape. I search for perfect light, then hunt for something earthbound to match with it.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.