Keith Sonnier Quotes

This is New York. You gotta work from upstairs to downstairs! You gotta work both ends of the street to have a career. Because it's not just fabricating an artwork. Your works have to go out into the world; they have to go to market. This art on the hoof has to be moved; it's got to go to the slaughterhouse at some point. Keep those dogies rollin'!

Sculpture, for me, provides that environmental discipline where you actually move in and around it. And if you have a good collaboration with an architect, to combine those aspects of color - I'm talking about color becoming a form within the building - that is a very different approach. I love contemporary architecture, which makes collaboration more interesting-and you have to be able to collaborate. It's like making a film, in a way: Everyone is a part of the team.

I have an intuitive understanding of technology. And the way I incorporate technology in the work tends to humanize it a great deal.

A lot of artists are good cooks as I'm too, but coming from a culture that was very concerned with food, I was very interested in that from the start. If you're interested in food, you're interested in lots of different aspects of culture. And it's like being interested in the music from a certain area, or writing, or whatever-food is part of that, too.

I love light in my work but I was never influenced by neon signage in itself, rather its effect on nature and architecture. You can't ignore what's around you, but at the same time, an artist who has a sophisticated form language knows how to pull in different elements, and readjust and redirect those. . . . So it becomes an engineering process, too.

I think everyone at some point comes up against a wall. Curiously, though, if you continue working, you might readdress that idea from another direction. If you didn't try something, you'd never have anything; if you didn't make an attempt to make the work, it wouldn't exist. There have been times when I could not work, and I would just go and sit down in the studio and wait to see what might happen. You can't always just go and take an exotic trip and come back and make something.