“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

Source: 1932 - 1946, The Studio 132:643', (1946), p. 280

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Barbara Hepworth 40

English sculptor 1903–1975

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“He [Giovanni Ardini, Italian master-carver] opened up a new vista for me of the quality of form, light, and colour contained in the Mediterranean conception of carving.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Hepworth's quote in: 'Approach to Sculpture', The Studio, London, October 1946, Vol. CXXXII, no. 643, p. 97
Hepworth is here referring to Giovanni Ardini's remark that "marble changes colour under different people's hands"
1932 - 1946

“I have been deeply interested during the last ten years in the use of colour with form. I have applied oil colour – white, grey, and blues of different degrees of tone... I have been very influenced by the natural colour and luminosity in stones and woods and the change in colour as light travels over the surface contours. When I pierced the material tight through a great change seemed to take place in the concavities from which direct light was excluded. From this experience my use of colour developed.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1932 - 1946, The Studio 132:643', (1946), p. 279

“I dream of a sculpture in which landscape, architecture and city are one. It might be a city like Marseille, a city steaming with heat which suddenly transmogrifies. I becomes an immense piece of sculpture, a gigantic figure, made up of white blocks and segmented by flat, horizontal terraces, arranged in a bare and motionless landscape.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

circa 1969
Quote of Wotruba in: 'Sculpture of Rotterdam', ed. Jan van Adrichem / Jelle Bouwhuis / Mariëtte Dulle, Center for the Art, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, p. 198.

“Light, for me is Hope. Colour, the Universe in which it exists.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

Extract critique by Uma Nair, Asian Age (Sourced from Victoria Ross Blog http://manavguptaartist.blogspot.in/), 2012
2010s

“Carving is interrelated masses conveying an emotion; a perfect relationship between the mind and the colour, light and weight which is the stone, made by the hand which feels. It must be so essentially sculpture that it can exist in no other way, something completely the right size but which has growth, something still and yet having movement, so very quiet and yet with a real vitality.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Extract from Hepworth's statement in Unit One, as cited in The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, ed. Herbert Read, London, 1934, p. 19
1932 - 1946

“Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[, ] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[. ] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it]..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris 7-14 October 1862 to James Whistler; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1075&nameid=Manet_E&sr=0&surname=&firstname=&rs=1 - System Number: 01075; Call Number: MS Whistler F 6.

“I cannot write anything about landscape without writing about the human figure and the human spirit inhabiting the landscape, for me, the whole art sculpture is a fusion of these two element – the balance of sensation and the evocation of man in his universe. Every work in sculpture is either a figure I see, or a sensation I have, whether in Yorkshire, Cornwall or Greece, or the Mediterranean.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

'Studio International 171' – June 1966; as quoted in Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York 1991, p. 280
1961 - 1975

“The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays.”

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The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), VI Perspective of Colour and Aerial Perspective

“A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Quote in his lecture at the Associazione Artistica Internationale, Rome May 1911, Boccioni's lecture 'La Pittura Futurista', 1911; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 55.
1911

“Our sense of touch is a fundamental sensibility which comes into action at birth – our stereognostic sense – the ability to feel weight and form and assess its significance. The form which have had special meaning for me since childhood have been the standing form (which is the translation of my feelings towards the human being standing in the landscape) the two forms (which is the tender relation of one living thing besides another); and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form (sometimes incorporating colour) which translates for me the association and meaning of gesture in landscape; in the repose of say a mother and child.... In all these shapes the translation of what one feels about man and nature must be conveyed by the sculptor in terms of mass, inner tension, and rhythm, scale in relation to our human size and the quality of surface which speaks through our hands and eyes.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 284

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