Rudolf Steiner Quotes

Cutting into color reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving.

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and the shape of things, and it's not just Ihe shape of any one thing, but the shape of any thing and everything.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

As when, O lady mine, With chiselled touch, The stone unhewn and cold, Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

It's very inconvenient being a sculptor. It's like playing the double-bass; one's so handicapped by one's baggage.

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

Never make heads straight on the shoulders, but turn them aside to the right or to the left, even though they look down, or upward, or straight ahead, because it is necessary for them to look lively and awake and not asleep. And do not depict the front or rear half of the whole person so that too much straightness is displaced, one half above or below the other half; and if you should wish to use stiff figures, do so only in portraying old people.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

The brush is a more powerful and rapid tool than the point or the stump... the main thing that the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure.

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.

As picture teaches the colouring, so sculpture the anatomy of form.

I made an airplane out of stone. . . I always did like staying home.

In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

I have never discovered that the nude could be studied in any way except the way I have adopted. All the muscles must be pointed out. To do this all the drapery must be removed.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.

I think it is no small attraction in a painter to be able to give a pleasing air to his figures, and whoever is not naturally possessed of this grace may acquire it by study, as opportunity offers in the following manner: be on the watch to take good parts of many beautiful faces of which the beautiful parts are established by general repute rather than by your own judgement, for you may deceive yourself by selecting faces that resemble your own, since it often seems that such similarities please us; ... so therefore choose the beautiful ones as I tell you and fix them in your mind.

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.