Artist Quotes

“[My interest in materials] has really to do with my learning what the materials are and what they can do in relationship to . . . the environment: the room, the wall, the floor.”
Lynda Benglis, from: interview by Kathryn Potts, video recording, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2009.

Contraband evokes “. . . toxic oil slicks on the bayou.”
Lynda Benglis, quoted in: Lynda Benglis, exhibition catalogue, edited by Franck Gautherot, Caroline Hancock, and Seungduk Kim (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 14.

“It is as difficult to take in all the glory of a dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”
Charles Burchfield, quoted in: Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 154.

“Paint directly—do not fill in outlined patterns.”
Charles Burchfield, quoted in: Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 15.

“My preference for watercolor is a natural one. To paint in watercolor is as natural to me as using a pencil; whereas I always feel self-conscious when I use oil.”
Charles Burchfield, quoted in: Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 12.

“I like to think of myself—as an artist—as being in a nondescript swamp, up to my knees in mire, painting the vital beauty that I see there, in my own way . . . ”
Charles Burchfield, quoted in: Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 9.

“Look on a tree not only as a design but also as a living growing object which almost has emotions like ourselves.”
Charles Burchfield, quoted in: Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 22.

“All afternoon, until well after six, on a large painting of the woods, the swamp with its winding creek and the hills beyond. I tried to hold myself down in size, but could not, and had to go back to the car to get a large sheet (29 × 44)—Hundreds of small tough maple saplings (4 to 6 feet high) made the going thru the woods rather difficult—However, their seemingly hostile interference only added flavor to the wildness of the spot.”
Charles Burchfield, from the artist’s journals, Gardenville, March 26, 1946, quoted in: exhibition wall label, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010.

“My fingers always seem busier than my mind.”
Alexander Calder, quoted in: Pepe Carmel, “The Alchemist: Alexander Calder and Surrealism,” in Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–1933, exhibition catalogue, edited by Joan Simon and Brigitte Léal (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008), 214.

“There was of course a Ringmaster in high form with a body made out of cork and a piece of cardboard, dressed in tails. He carried a whistle for stopping the music to make announcements, and a mouth organ for bugle sounds to announce the arrival of someone important.”*
Alexander Calder, quoted in: Alexander Calder, “Here Is a Little History of My Circus,” in Permanance du Cirque (Paris: Revue Neuf, 1952), http://calder.org/historicaltexts/text/16.html.

“Mom and dad served peanuts during the intermission. There was beer in a keg. Also, various friends were given instruments to make noises—cymbals or a cardboard tube that was used when they wanted to roar like a lion.”
Mary Rower, quoted in: Eleanora Nagy, “Calder’s Once and Future Circus: A Conservator’s Perspective,” in Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–1933, exhibition catalogue, edited by Joan Simon and Brigitte Léal (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008), 201.

“…the mobile has actual movement in itself,…[it] dances in front of you.”
Alexander Calder, from: interview by Katherine Kuh, in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), http://calder.org/historicaltexts/text/17.html.

“When I don’t feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!”
Edward Hopper, quoted in: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, exhibition catalogue (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980), 58.

“[Self-Portrait at Eleven Years Old is like] the teenage bedroom or the collages of the obsessed fan.”
Glenn Ligon, quoted in: Reena Jana, “Glenn Ligon’s Self Portrait,” Art on Paper 9 (January/February 2005), 38.

“. . . paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in: Patterson Sims in Whitney Museum of American Art: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection, compiled by Kristie Jayne (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 53.

Her friend and fellow artist Marsden Hartley once said that her flowers are “so huge that they shut out the sky above them—shut out even the morning that opens them.”
From: Patterson Sims in Whitney Museum of American Art: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection, compiled by Kristie Jayne (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 53.

“The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in: Lloyd Goodrich and Doris Bry, Georgia O’Keeffe, exhibition catalogue, edited by Lloyd Goodrich (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970), 23.

“During the first two or three weeks in a new city, I try to visit as many places as possible and be taken around by people who live there and know the city. I listen to what they say about it. Also, I try to read every newspaper and magazine on sale. I sketch a lot. And I observe the food.”
Claes Oldenburg, quoted in: Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument, exhibition catalogue (Pasadena, California: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 8–10.

“People have lots of reactions to this toilet . . . . Their associations surprise me because a toilet is one of the major sculptural things in the home.”
Claes Oldenburg, from: Claes Oldenburg, “The Master of the Soft Touch,” Life Magazine, November 21, 1969, 50.

“I’d be in my studio making up a character and then go out in character to join the party. I’d have put in all this energy into the makeup and I’d think, Why waste it.”
Cindy Sherman, quoted in: Rochelle Steiner, “Cast of Characters,” in Cindy Sherman, exhibition catalogue (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2003), n.p.

She has described the subjects of a series from the 2000s as “. . . very ordinary older women— – the type you’d spot in a supermarket.”
Cindy Sherman, quoted in: Rochelle Steiner, “Cast of Characters,” in Cindy Sherman, exhibition catalogue (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2003), n.p.

“I was always glued to the television when I was a kid, and I loved movies. There was one show, The Million Dollar Movie, that played the same film over and over every night for a week, so you could really know it by heart.”
Cindy Sherman, quoted in: Peter Galassi, “Cindy Sherman: The Making of Untitled,” in Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 4.

“Film Stills should trigger your memory so that you feel you have seen it before. Some people have told me they remember the movie that one of my images derives from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.“
Cindy Sherman, from: “Q & A: Cindy Sherman,” interview by Lisbet Nelson, American Photographer, September 1983, 77.

“Part of it could be that I want to see what I look like as a certain character—even though I know that person isn’t me . . . . There is also me making fun—making fun of these role models of women from my childhood. And part of it maybe is to show that these women who are playing these characters . . . maybe these actresses know what they’re doing, know they are playing stereotypes . . . but what can they do?”
Cindy Sherman, quoted in: Gerald Marzorati, “Imitation of Life,” ARTnews, September 1983, 86.

Simonds’s work relates to a central theme: “How people live in time and space in relation to their architecture."
Charles Simonds, quoted in: Phil Patton, “Charles Simonds’ Lost Worlds,” ARTnews, February 1983, 86.

“Every clay is different. It responds differently when you touch it. If you are aware, it speaks. It tells you who it is.”
Charles Simonds, quoted in: Phil Patton, “Charles Simonds’ Lost Worlds,” ARTnews, February 1983, 88.

“Since 1970, most of my time has been spent going around the streets of New York building clay dwelling-places for an imaginary civilization of Little People who are migrating through the city.”
Charles Simonds, from: Charles Simonds, “Microcosm to Macrocosm/Fantasy World to Real World,” Artforum, February 1974, 36.

“[Charles Simonds’s Little People] live wherever the architecture of the city seems to offer them a home—in gutters, on window ledges, in niches in walls, under loading platforms, in vacant lots.”
Charles Simonds, from: Charles Simonds, “Microcosm to Macrocosm/Fantasy World to Real World,” Artforum, February 1974, 36–37.