Louise Berliawsky Nevelson quotes

True strength is delicate.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Strength #True Strength #Delicate

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Art #Pain #Thinking

But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all.... You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Acceptance #Color #Black

When you are doing a piece you are with it. You don't want to wait until next week, when experience will have given you something else.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Waiting #Pieces #Want

I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#World #Saws #Made

Some of us come on earth seeing – some of us come on earth seeing color.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Color #Earth

Everytime I put on clothes, I’m creating a picture.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Clothes #Creating

When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Spiritual #People #Together

I only know this - that you can’t give advice to an artist.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Artist #Giving #Advice

Character is the architect of the being.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Kindness #Character #Be Kind

I think all great innovations are built on rejections.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Thinking #Rejection #Innovation

It gave me great pleasure to think that I could take wood, make it good, and make people like Rockefeller buy it with paper money.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Thinking #People #Paper

I still want to do my work. I still want to do my livingness. And I have lived. I have been fulfilled. I recognized what I had, and I never sold it short. And I ain't through yet.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Want #Fulfilled #Stills

What we start with is a conviction to fulfill our being. Horses, trees fulfill themselves. Why shouldn't people.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Horse #People #Tree

I was given the gifts of the artist, and the trouble that goes with them: So I have that blessing, and there was never a time thatI questioned it or doubted it.... For forty years, I wanted to jump out of windows.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Artist #Blessing #Years

I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Tunes #Vibrations #Process

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Art #Creative #Mind

You know when I decided to become professional - that means to expose yourself naked to the world with the other creative minds - I said, 'I'm going into areas I don't know. I might just fall right down to hell and kill myself.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Fall #Mean #Creative

Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Teacher #School #Artist

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Artist #Giving #Pieces

In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Life Is #Ends

There's no denying that Caruso came with a voice?that Beethoven came with music in his soul, Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib.You're born with it.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Angel #Voice #Drawing

I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

I've taught, and the first thing I did when I taught art, was not to teach art.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Art #Teaching #Firsts

In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall. That's the only place where everything is all right.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Cows

The outside wold pressures you into a mold, but if you don't accept that - you gamble with life. Call it gambling.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Gambling #Risk #Mold

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#White #Trying #Pieces

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Husband #Creativity #Circles

I'm a work horse. I like to work. I always did. I think that there is such a thing as energy, creation overflowing. And I always felt that I have this great energy and it was bound to sort of burst at the seams, so that my work automatically took its place with a mind like mine. I've never had a day when I didn't want to work. I've never had a day like that. And I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy. I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working. ... In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Horse #Work #Thinking

Who is an artist? I say we take a title. No one gives it to us. We make our lives.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Artist #Giving #Titles

[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Effort #Taste #Century

I think that in the sexual act, as delightful as it can be, the very physical part of it is, yes, a hammering away. So it has a certain brutality.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Thinking #Brutality #Certain

If you have got a living force and you're not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Blood #Like You #Pot

It's a hell of a thing to be born, and if you're born you're at least entitled to your own self.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Self #Hell #Born

I think people should think a million times before they give birth. The guilts of motherhood were the worst guilts in the world for me. They were really insurmountable. You see, you are depriving another human being of so many things, and the other party also knows it.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Party #Motherhood #Thinking

No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Mirrors #Matter #Individual

And I saw darkness for weeks. It never dawned on me that I could come out of it, but you heal. Nature heals you, and you do come out of it. All of a sudden I saw a crack of light ... then all of a sudden I saw another crack of light. Then I saw forms in the light. And I recognized that there was no darkness, that in darkness there'll always be light.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Healing #Light #Darkness

I feel totally female. I didn't compete with men and I don't want to look like a man! I love being a lady and dressing up and masquerading and wearing all the fineries. I'm breaking down the idea that the artist has to look poor, with berets.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Artist #Love Is #Men

I feel that women 'and men,' but I mean the 'individual,' can be totally feminine and still be totally powerful.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Powerful #Mean #Men

My mother was very sympathetic. She was the one who really gave me the courage to take my freedom.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Mother #Mentor #Sympathetic

We must create our own world.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#World #April

Greatness breaks laws.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Greatness #Law #Break

I never liked the middle ground-the most boring place in the world.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#World #Boring #Middle

In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line… From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Art #School #Lines

I don’t demand that all work be a masterpiece. What I am doing is the right thing for me - that is what I am and this is living. It reflects me and I reflect it.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Demand #Masterpiece #Right Thing

I never feel age... If you have creative work you don't have age or time.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Creative #Age #Aging

The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Men #Justice #Social Justice

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Reality #Agreement #People

A woman may not hit a ball stronger than a man, but it is different. I prize that difference.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Men #Differences #Stronger

I believe that the physical is the geography of the being.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Believe #Body #I Believe

I began to stack my sculptures into an environment. It was natural. It was a flowing of energy.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Energy #Sculpture #Environment

You must create your own world. I am responsible for my world.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#World #Responsible

A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Art #School #Reflection

I was discouraged about life, discouraged about people being blind, but I don't think I had a day that I ever questioned creativity. There has never been a day like that.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Confidence #Creativity #Thinking

If they blow it [the world] up, that's not my business. My business is to work.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Business #Blow #World

A whisper can be stronger, as an atom is stronger, than a whole mountain.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Mountain #Stronger #Atoms

I believe in my work and in the joy of it. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Work #Believe #Joy

Most of us have to be transplanted before we blossom.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Travel

I've been so lonely for long periods of my life that if a rat walked in I would have welcomed it.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Lonely #Loneliness #Long

It is as hard to take success as it is failure.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Birth #Kind #Surprise

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Creating #World #Harmony

I see no reason why I should tickle stones or waste time on polishing bronze.
-- Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

#Stones #Waste #Wasting Time