feelings and thoughts pass through the fingers (8 December 2016)

 Barbara Hepworth's working drawings for Tides 1

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

- Barbara Hepworth

My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.

- Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth with her cat Nicholas and Curved Reclining Form (Rosewall), 1960–2

All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.

- Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth, Oval Form (Trezion), 1961-63

 Barbara Hepworth, Green Caves. 1956

The naturalness of life... the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.

- Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth, Curved Forms (Pavan), 1956

Body experience... is the centre of creation.

- Barbara Hepworth