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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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Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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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
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I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.
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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Stained glass enabled the modern world.
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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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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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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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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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.
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'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 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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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 like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.
Kiki Smith
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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
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The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.
Kiki Smith