One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
Andy GoldsworthyRead
I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh β difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the coexistence of beauty and harshness in nature.
In this quote, Andy Goldsworthy reflects on the duality of nature, acknowledging that while it possesses stunning beauty, it is also a realm filled with decay and brutality. He emphasizes that as an artist, he must work within the parameters set by nature, confronting its raw and sometimes disturbing realities while still appreciating its overall essence.
In practice
A speaker at a conservation workshop might quote this to illustrate the complexities of environmental work.
One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them.
I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.
Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.
There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.
The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
Solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society can ill do without.
I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars.
I think Nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax!
London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
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