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

Kiki Smith

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Kiki Smith
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: January 18
Artist
Illustrator
Installation Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Photographer
Printmaker
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Nürnberg
Ḳiḳi Smit
Seeing
Making
Energy
Art
Happens
Something

More quotes by Kiki Smith

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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
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I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.
Kiki Smith
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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
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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
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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
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I'm in general a nostalgic person, but I don't know if I'm nostalgic for the 80s!
Kiki Smith
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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
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I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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When studio art started being seen as important, I joined Colab, and then I became very involved.
Kiki Smith
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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
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I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.
Kiki Smith
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The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.
Kiki Smith
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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
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It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.
Kiki Smith
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My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.
Kiki Smith
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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
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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
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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.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith