Hepworth Quotes & Sayings

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm. — Barbara Hepworth

One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole. — Barbara Hepworth

I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create. — Barbara Hepworth

At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution. — Barbara Hepworth

Led Zeppelin created their music from a diet of Bert Jansch, Memphis Minnie, John Fahey, Billy Fury, Phil Spector, Richard 'Rabbit' Brown, Moby Grape, Manitas De Plata and Om Kalsoum. Those who came afterwards were content with a diet of Led Zeppelin, which is not the same thing at all. — David Hepworth

Dementia isn't the only place that memories are found to be flawed - people find out they can't rely on their memories every day. People blindsided in relationships. People who find out their truth is a lie. People pulled from trauma. People awakened, as in Anna and Eve. I wondered: If you can't use memories to steer your life, what can you use? I didn't know. It was why I had to write this book. — Sally Hepworth

My left hand is my thinking hand (image), my right hand my doing hand (sequence). — Barbara Hepworth

My ambition is not to leave behind me a pile of money for my heirs to quarrel about, but to find out what there is of interest in this world before I cross the border and begin to explore the other world. — George H. Hepworth

It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole. — Barbara Hepworth

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. — Barbara Hepworth

God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost
while we live. — John Hepworth

We are none of us infallible not even the youngest of us. — William Hepworth Thompson

My works are an imitation of my own past and present. — Barbara Hepworth

I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep. — Barbara Hepworth

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body. — Barbara Hepworth

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

Body experience ... is the centre of creation. — Barbara Hepworth

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again ... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid. — Barbara Hepworth

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. — Barbara Hepworth

When you get to my age,' he says, his face softening, 'you don't waste time with regrets. In the end, you just remember the moments of joy. When all is said and done, those are the things we keep. — Sally Hepworth

I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you're professional or you're not. — Barbara Hepworth

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. — Barbara Hepworth

I like it when people remember that I'm a person, not just a person with Alzheimer's. — Sally Hepworth

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism. — Barbara Hepworth

What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties. — William Hepworth Thompson

I have gained very great inspiration from the Cornish land- and seascape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one's sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city. — Barbara Hepworth

Before I start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say 'almost' because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor's ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea; the point being that the material has vitality - it resists and makes demands ... — Barbara Hepworth

I never had a good answer to Mom's question. 'If I don't remember, will I have been here at all?' But maybe her question was flawed. Maybe it doesn't matter what you remember. Maybe if someone else remembers and speaks your name, you were here. — Sally Hepworth

The United Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure. — Barbara Hepworth

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 form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess 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 the hollow, the thrust and the contour. — Barbara Hepworth