Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth DBEwas an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. She was one of the few female artists to achieve international prominence. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth10 January 1903
thinking artist community
The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.
thinking hands left-hand
My left hand is my thinking hand (image), my right hand my doing hand (sequence).
thinking hands sculpture
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.
succeed failing united-nations
The United Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure.
block sheep sculpture
I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep.
art body creation
Body experience... is the centre of creation.
yield details tiny
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.
form hollow thrust
I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour
art past imitation
My works are an imitation of my own past and present.
form impulse clear
I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.
order space purpose
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.
midnight found
I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you're professional or you're not.
past emotional creative
[My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .
men primitive-man drawing
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.