I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. So long as I’ve learned something about why.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIIn every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist’s obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.
More Alberto Giacometti Quotes
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I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
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Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won’t know what it is until I succeed in doing it.
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Art is the residue of vision.
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That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
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If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?
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The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
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The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays the part of antennae making life possible for people and life itself is inside the skull.
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When I make my drawings… the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.
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At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.
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In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.
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The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.
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When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.
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All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.
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The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and – instead of giving up – you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling – be it an illusion or not – that something new has opened up.
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It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI