Kiki Smith Quotes

In drawing, I often think of things as flying buttresses.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

It is very different when you age. The things that are significant, or what drives you, or the physical experience of being driven, changes over time.

Sometimes your personal life is much more significant. Sometimes your work life is more significant. Friends and family, or sometimes the general population, take precedence.

I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.

When I was young, it was an exciting time to be in New York.

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.

I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions and so it's not just about you in your you-dom.

I think a lot of making art is listening to yourself.

I didn't start to be an artist myself until I was 24.

We as beings are very contradictory, complicated creatures that work in our best interest and against our best interest. In a certain way, I want my work to have all that messiness.

Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died.

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Life really changes. And it gets lighter, for the most part. You tolerate yourself and others better.

I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day.

Stained glass enabled the modern world.

I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life.

I'm peripheral in Colab's history because others were involved in media, filmmaking, and music, and I was always a studio artist.

I always thought it was a trap to fit into ideologies, and maybe that's a luxury position, but my work is a reflection of my being here. My being here is not a reflection of an idea.

Life changes a lot. I guarantee you.

Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways.

I certainly am one of those people who is incredibly privileged to have an art career, which happened out of luck. Then luck kept happening. Besides that, things just move along in their own weird way.

Many people don't have relationships to their siblings in adulthood, or they have superficial ones. It's sort of unfashionable, particularly in America, to be close to your family.

Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change.

I love flying buttresses!

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically.

Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.

When you get older, you're running out of time. You care more about trying to stay on the planet a little longer, so you can learn how to draw better!

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

The miracle of being able to pay attention to other people in your life, and the miracle of being in time, and to continue being in time.

I have to make about a million proofs of everything. I don’t know, it’s just a repetition, like a meditation. You come back to something and then you leave it, and then you come back again and you leave it, and each time it changes. And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go.

As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed - but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn't know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things.

When studio art started being seen as important, I joined Colab, and then I became very involved.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

Now, it is much more difficult for young people coming to New York. But also when you're young, you have more time to interact with one another, to discover yourself with people of your generation.

I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.

I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.

In our family, there wasn't anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother's singing.

You start with a generic body, but I think the first wall you hit with portraiture is comprised of history and storytelling and the nature of characters - whether they are historical or coming from literature or documentation. Those are the references we have to people, besides your family, and the intimacy of portraiture is in the specifics of individuals. For me, it came out of doing things about animals.

You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision.

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.

I had stopped making figures, and then I began making images of animals in nature, which was a way to introduce the figure.

As an artist, you want to have an experience. What you need to experience changes over the course of your life because your life changes.

I'm not moving from an ideological standpoint. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life better. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life worse! I'm trying to find a happy medium that I can make some sense of.

My iPhone has changed my life - I spend hours taking photos of the sidewalk as I walk down the street. I like the casualness, that it's low-resolution.

My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.