Louise Bourgeois Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands...”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented - which is what fear and anxiety do to a person - into something whole.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“A work of art doesn't have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Art is a way of recognizing oneself...”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation-and I like that.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“A work of art doesn't have to be explained,”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Art is manipulation without intervention.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“... geometry became a symbol for human relations, except that it was better, because in geometry things never go bad. If certain things occur, if certain lines meet, an angle is born. You cannot fail. It's not going to fail; it is eternal. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total. Thus, I'm able to avoid or manipulate or process pain.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I dont watch TV. I dont use a computer, a fax or a cellphone.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“My work has to do with a defense against fervor. People are always in a rush. To do what? To do nothing! There is a kind of fervor that is completely meaningless. This drawing is a call for meditation.... I am an insomniac, so for me the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach. But I still try to conquer the insomnia, and to a large extent I have done it; it is conquerable. My drawings are a kind of rocking or stroking and an attempt at finding peace. Peaceful rhythm. Like rocking a baby to sleep.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering... To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread %u2013 sometimes it was still warm %u2013 I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“I work like a bee and feel that I accomplish little.”
-- Louise Bourgeois -
“Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.”
-- Louise Bourgeois
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