Janet Echelman Quotes

What do I want to express? The subject means little. The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things.

I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it...my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.

All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a sculpture.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

There's that weird and cool line that music can cross where it still gives you the goosebumps and you think it's cool but on the other hand it's sort of like also letting you off the hook a little bit with the ironic aspects of the thing. I think that's the inexplicable, the smell of a movie. That's the taste of the movie.

The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist's eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder.

[My work] is using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin - and I mean, we are literally light-eaters - to then affect the way that we see.

Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.

Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

Inspiration, move me brightly, light the song with sense and color, hold away despair

When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something.

The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form.