Robert Irwin Quotes & Sayings

“It's a constant, continuous, spectacular world we live in, and every day you see things that just knock you out, if you pay attention.”

“Gardening always has been an art, essentially.”

“Palms are like cockroaches. They were here long before us, and they'll be here long after us. They're the only things standing after a hurricane.”

“There's no palette as rich as a garden. And the intensity of it - I make this statement all the time: You can't plan nature; you court her.”

“There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.”

“The thing about a plant is, let's say it will have 50 or 100 little points of bright red. If you look at the thing as it goes down, it becomes green in a way... It is way more spectacular than pointillist paintings where these things are played with, but never to the level of what happens in nature.”

“I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.”

“Whenever you look at light, basically it's just air. It has no tactileness to it. It's totally without density.”

“For the next week, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you've already done the first and most critical thing, you've honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you've actually changed the world.”

“It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.”