It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
Interpretation
Artists should avoid excessive discussion about their work to maintain the creative tension necessary for their art.
Henry Moore suggests that for artists such as sculptors and painters, discussing their creative process can undermine the focus and intensity needed to create their artwork. By advocating for a more reserved approach to explaining their craft, he emphasizes the importance of preserving the energy and inspiration that drive artistic expression.
In practice
An artist sharing this quote during a gallery opening to explain his approach to creativity.
Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.
I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.
A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.
I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.
It helps me to learn things in different languages, even if it's just phonetically, and to make myself vulnerable to other audiences by trying to reflect back to them the genius of their own cultures, and to do that, oftentimes, in new jazz settings, new arrangements. It's a way to show respect.
Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.
The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.
The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.
Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.
Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle
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