Organic Forms Quotes

Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God; though, referred to herself, she is genius; and there is a similarity between her operations and man's art even in the details and trifles. When the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe. Man's art has wisely imitated those forms into which all matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit.

Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.

I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.

Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life.

I’m interested in natural growth patterns, and the beautiful forms that only nature creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I’m trying to understand.

Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.

I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details.

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.

Nature is my main source of inspiration - I will never stop taking hints from what I call 'the greatest artist'

Before computers, you'd start designing using shapes of cubes. Now I can start with something like a handkerchief, an object that doesn't have strong inside and outside boundaries or much closed volume.

There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.'

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

I want to modernize the ancient. I prefer to work with materials formed naturally over thousands of years.

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

I've collected John Ward pieces for years. Ward represents ideas of nature and of sediments.

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

Curves are so emotional.

Fractal geometry is everywhere, even in lines drawn in the sand. It's the cycle of life... You see fractals in plants, in flowers. Within the human lung are branches within branches.