Quote

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

Kiki Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kiki Smith
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: January 18
Artist
Illustrator
Installation Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Photographer
Printmaker
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Nürnberg
Ḳiḳi Smit
Things
Ugly
Think
Making
Thinking
Often
Art
Beautiful
Firsts
First
Important
Considered

More quotes by Kiki Smith

Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
Stained glass enabled the modern world.
Kiki Smith
Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
I had stopped making figures, and then I began making images of animals in nature, which was a way to introduce the figure.
Kiki Smith
Image
The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.
Kiki Smith
Image
It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.
Kiki Smith
Image
The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.
Kiki Smith
Image
Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.
Kiki Smith
Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
Life changes a lot. I guarantee you.
Kiki Smith
Image
Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change.
Kiki Smith
Image
Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.
Kiki Smith
Image
My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.
Kiki Smith
Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
It was a very economically depressed time [the 80s] and because of that, there was a lot of space. Everything was relatively dilapidated, and one could live on a pretty low income. One could live well below the poverty line and not suffer immensely.
Kiki Smith
Image
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.
Kiki Smith
Image
Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.
Kiki Smith
Image
Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.
Kiki Smith