I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.
Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.
I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.
I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is.
My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.
I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
The role of art in society differs for every artist.
