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.
To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.
Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, the modeling. See what remains after that.
I love finding out-of-the-box inspirations and blending them with what I've done in the past. And when I started to experiment with genres, it didn't sound forced. Maybe that's because it's all music that I listened to growing up, and it's all music that I love.
I'm a conductor of revivals. The only minister in the whole package. Little Richard, the evangelist.
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