Sculptors

"How old are you? As old as the Buddha. And how old is the Buddha? As old as I am"

"The Void is a living void … pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction. The great Void does not exist as Void, it embraces all Being/non-Being"

"a single leaf falling autumn is everywhere…"

"Illusion is the mantle of the Real"

"Is there anything more miraculous than the wonders of nature?" the monk asked. The Master answered: "Yes! Your awareness, your understanding of the wonders of nature."

"… each dot: the center of a circle without circumference …"

"The sinner's ego is crude that of the saint refined, distilled. Careful! It may be more poisonous!"

"When a monk complained about the world's evil, the Buddha stretched his hand toward the Earth: "on this Earth I attained Liberation.""

"I am neither I nor Other, both I and other…"

"As the journey of "Third Text", a collaborative art project that brings together participants from all over the world, particularly from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, continues, the idea also begins contemplating those land-based projects which were somewhat abandoned in the early seventies."

"Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I a non-European relate to European society I find myself living in but do not belong to? How do I react to its assumptions of white superiority?"

"Per kontributin e tij te madh ne zhvillimin e kultures Shqiptare dhe per vlerat e vyera qytetare"

"“Vepra ka strukturën e një kori ku janë të gjitha zërat, që lidhen më njëri-tjetrin si në një polifoni, ku herë del sipër rrëfyesi, herë të thënat e Kacelit, dhe herë zërat e atyre që shprehen për të. Dhe kjo polifoni ka një sfond të rëndësishëm: materialin fotografik shumë të pasur, qoftë edhe me dokumenta, me foto të jetës dhe kryesorja, me fotot e pikturave që përbëjnë fillin e Arianës në këtë udhëtim aspak të lehtë dhe i jep atmosferën e duhur për ta ndjekur me kureshtje”"

"Për nivel të lartë në krijimtari, një kontribut në shquar në artet figurative Shqiptare dhe një ndihmë të pakursyer në përgatitjen e brezave të artistëve të rinj."

"Similar people, artists like Kaceli, ennoble the human race, overall, and our Albanian race, in particular."

"I have never agreed to the word of creative activity. Man does not create. In the best case, he interprets, in a good or bad way; in the worst case, he manipulates, cheats and causes confusion; like in all the walks of life, in art as well..."

"Life is no speculation, but the path towards something."

"Art is neither the monopoly of a nation, nor of a social class, or the major age. People of outstanding talents and fine feelings, people who are not lacking in imagnation and the sense of creation, as well as good will-power. They are privileged to be involved in ART."

"Kaceli, the titian of the Albanian painting."

"There has never been any division between my life and my work."

"She had her first child in the summer of 1929, and her triplets in the autumn of 1934, and shortly afterwards began to make her first really abstract work. It is through her 'Mother & Child' carvings [she started c. 1935], that Barbara Hepworth began to work out her tendency to pierce the stone and to group pieces in relation to each other. In many ways the removal of stone at the center of the figure.. ..seem integrally bound up with the development of the hole in modern sculpture."

"The comparisons and contrasts between these two artists [ Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth] are astounding. They went to the same schools, were part of the same artist movements like the 'Seven and Five Society' and 'Unit One', they spent summer holidays together - Henry Moore even lived in one of Barbara Hepworth’s old houses after she had moved to the country. The influence between the two, whether conscious or subconscious, cannot be denied. The discrepancies of who did what first [ piercing the stone / making a hole] feels insignificant when you consider all they have done in reflection of each other."

"When the Surrealist exhibition [in London, 1936] was held Barbara was by then married to [the sculptor] Ben Nicholson, they were strongly against it [ Surrealism ], though I felt, and feel, that there needn't be the sort of division in art that sprang up then. And Ben had also been much influenced by Mondrian. He was devoted to abstract art and she became much more interested in the abstract form. But for me, the essence of sculpture has always been the human figure. Still, of course, one kept in touch and one met and one’s paths crossed."

"Hepworth's work truly resides in abstract forms. Her sculptures throughout her life maintained a primordial, almost prehistoric Brancusian egg-reference, with the near constant presence of the hole. Hepworth was quoted as saying, 'The pierced hole allows bodily entry and re-entry'."

"At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. I think art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution. I've said that and I do believe it, that one does contribute to art and that's nothing to do with being male or female.. .I don't think a good work of art can just be said to be feminine or masculine.. ..art's either good or isn't."

"It's [the art-magazine 'Circle'] been reprinted and it's now referred to as classic. Well it is. But w:Ben Nicholson, Sir Leslie Martin, Gabo and Leslie Martin's wife, Sadie Speaight, and I did that. We were sitting round the fire and we said, 'Why shouldn't we do a book?'. And so we started and now it's a classic and referred to as such."

"I've found opposition to my teaching because I said it's not the strength which does it, it's a rhythm. You don't need huge muscles great strength. In fact, if you have that and misuse it, you're going to damage the material. It's absurd. It's a rhythmical flow of an idea, whichever sex you are."

"I loved the family and everything to do with them. I loved the environment and the cooking. I used to cook and go in my studio. I had to have methods of working. If I was in the middle of a work and the oven burned or the children called for me, I used to make an arrangement with music, records, or poetry, so that when I went back to the studio, I picked up where I left off. I enjoyed it, you see; it was part of me."

"I have to dedicate myself. Do you understand? I don't feel conflict in myself because if I do, my work doesn't go well. If there's conflict I have to sit down or go to sleep to solve it. And the only way to solve the problem is to produce really affirmative work which can only come – I can't make it come. I can't conjure it up. I can only go to sleep and hope it happens.. .You have to digest it and if you digest you can contribute."

"There is an oval sculpture of 1943. I was in despair because my youngest daughter, one of the triplets, had osteomyelitis. In those days the war was on and you couldn't get anything. She was ill for four years. I thought the only thing I can do to help this awful situation, because we never knew if it would worsen, is to make some beautiful object. Something as clean as I can make it as a kind of present for her. It's happened again and again. When my son died, he was killed [in the war], it's the only way I can go on."

"Our sense of touch is a fundamental sensibility which comes into action at birth – our stereognostic sense – the ability to feel weight and form and assess its significance. The form which have had special meaning for me since childhood have been the standing form (which is the translation of my feelings towards the human being standing in the landscape) the two forms (which is the tender relation of one living thing besides another); and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form (sometimes incorporating colour) which translates for me the association and meaning of gesture in landscape; in the repose of say a mother and child.. ..In all these shapes the translation of what one feels about man and nature must be conveyed by the sculptor in terms of mass, inner tension, and rhythm, scale in relation to our human size and the quality of surface which speaks through our hands and eyes."

"In my search for these values I like to work both realistically and abstractly. In my drawing and painting I turn from one to the other as a necessity or impulse and not because of a preconceived design of action. When drawing what I see I am usually most conscious of the underlying principle of abstract form in human beings and their relationship one to the other. In making my abstract drawings I am most often aware of those human values which dominate the structure and meaning of abstract forms. Sculpture is the fusion of these two attitudes and I like to be free as to the degree of abstraction and realism in carving. The dominant feeling will always be the love of humanity and nature; and the love of sculpture for itself."

"We visited Meudon [c.1938] to see Hans Arp and though, to our disappointment, he was not there and his wife, Sofie Täuber showed us his studio. It was very quiet in the room so that one was aware of the movement in the forms.. .I thought of the poetic idea in [Hans] Arp's sculptures. I had never had any first-hand knowledge of the Dadaist movement, so that seeing his work for the first time freed me of many inhibitions and this helped me to see the figure in landscape with new eyes.. .Perhaps in freeing himself from material demands his idea transcended all possible limitations. I began to imagine the earth rising and becoming human."

"You can't make a sculpture, in my opinion, without involving your body. You move and you feel and you breathe and you touch. The spectator is the same. His body is involved too. If it's a sculpture he has to first of all sense gravity. He's got two feet. Then he must walk and move and use his eyes and this is a great involvement. Then if a form goes in like that – what are those holes for? One is physically involved and this is sculpture. It's not architecture. It's rhythm and dance and everything. It's do with swimming and movement and air and sea and all our well-being. Sculpture is involved in the body living in the spirit or the spirit living in the body, whichever way you like to put it."

"'Circle' was published at last [constructivist manifesto, in 1937 - with Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson a.o.]. Mondrian has made his studio opposite so very beautiful, and his company was always inspiring, as it had been in Paris when we used to visit him. After a while he really seemed to our domestic scene. His studio and Ben’s [the sculptor Ben Nicholson; Barbara was his wife then] were most austere, but my studio was a jumble of children, rocks, sculptures, trees, importunate flowers and washing."

"Working in the abstract way seems to release one’s personality and sharpen the perceptions so that in the observation of humanity or landscape it is the wholeness of inner intention which moves one so profoundly. The components fall into place and one is no longer aware of the detail except as the necessary significance of wholeness and unity.. ..a rhythm of form which has its roots in earth but reaches outwards towards the unknown experiences of the future. The thought underlying this form is, for me, the delicate balance the spirit of man maintains between his knowledge and the laws of the universe."

"Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize.. ..It is essentially practical and passionate."

"The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life."

"Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape."

"I cannot write anything about landscape without writing about the human figure and the human spirit inhabiting the landscape, for me, the whole art sculpture is a fusion of these two element – the balance of sensation and the evocation of man in his universe. Every work in sculpture is either a figure I see, or a sensation I have, whether in Yorkshire, Cornwall or Greece, or the Mediterranean."

"My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone. It is also a listening hand. It listens for basic weaknesses or flaws in the stone; for the possibility or imminence of fractures."

"Ascended Kynthos alone, the cave of Apollo – half-way magnificent and majestic. A pool with fine fig trees nearby full of giant (sacred?) toads – leaping and barking. Also green frogs."

"All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the forms. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of foulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour."

"I think all these new sculptors [after World War 2.] – he Anthony Caro is not all that young though – are taking stand against abominable architecture since the war and I think rightly so. But again I feel it's not enough to be against something. You have to do something that will damn well replace it. Where do you put these sculptures?.. .I like to think that time is timeless and I wouldn't want to make a work which wouldn't last for more than ten years – nor a work that wouldn't go anywhere. It would make me terrible mad. Mind you, I have to wait to find for my work. It doesn't happen all that easily, but it does happen. It slips in somewhere. Before the war the architects were very much one with the sculptors, painters, everybody. We thought alike. Then the war was over.. ..the architects gave up coming to look at sculpture and painting."

"Saw a magnificent Koros – tall, fierce and passionate bigger than life size – in the Museum. A heavenly work – the backs and buttocks in relation to the hip and waist – an inspiration. I thought the fragment of leg and calf (attached below the knee) was falsely attributed."

"Sculpture communicates an immediate sense of life - you can feel the pulse of it. It is perceived, above all, by the sense of touch which is our earliest sensation; and touch gives us a sense of living contact and security. [...] That has nothing to do with the question of perfection, or harmony, or purity, or escapism. It lies far deeper; it is the primitive instinct which allows man to live fully with all his perceptions active and alert, and in the calm acceptance of the balance of life and death. In its insistence on elementary values, sculpture is perhaps more important today than before because life's continuity is threatened and this has given us a sense of unbalance."

"Light and space ... are the sculptor's materials as much as wood or stone ... I feel that I can relate my work more easily, in the open air, to the climate and the landscape."

"Art at the moment is thrilling. The work of the artist today springs from innate impulses towards life, towards growth - impulses whose rhythms and structures have to do with the power and insistence of life. [...] In the past, when sculpture was based on the human figure, we knew this structure well. But today we are concerned with structures in an infinitely wider sense, in a universal sense. Our thoughts can either lead us to life and continuity or [...] the way to annihilation. That is why it is so important that we find our complete sense of continuity backwards and forwards in this new world of forms and values. I see the present development in art as something opposed to any materialistic, anti-human or mechanistic direction of mind."

"[the 1960's began] with a feeling of tremendous liberation, because I at last had space and money and time to work on a much bigger scale."

"A chance remark by Ardini, an Italian master carver whom I met there [in Rome], that 'marble changes colour under different people's hands' made me decide immediately that it was not dominance which one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion, and above all greater co-ordination between head and hand. This thought has recurred again and again ever since - and has developed my greatest interests; the reason why people both move differently and stand differently in direct response to changed surroundings; the unconscious grouping of people when they are working together, producing a spatial movement which approximates to the structure of spirals in shells or rhythms in crystal structure; the meaning of the spaces between forms, or the shape of the displacement of forms in space, which in themselves have a most precise significance. All these responses spring from a factual and tactile approach to the object."