Barbara Hepworth Quotes

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

But I found that being an artist and doing accurate work is very difficult.

Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

I think there's something beautiful about the art of making art, and it just will live and breathe.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important.

The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

Art is craft, not inspiration.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn't learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

An architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist.

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of painting.