Ian Hamilton Finlay Quotes

Little Sparta is a garden in the traditional sense. It is perhaps not like other modern gardens, but I think that other times would have had no difficulty with it.

A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.

Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden.

In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall - that when the play is finished, it's done - but now I realise it's more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living.

I like to think that my works flow like music. That may be one reason I work in large groups versus one picture of one thing; it's the flow of the whole series that counts.

No doubt these rocky islands have suggested the idea worked out in gardens, and they have been well imitated.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.

I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case.

Even when I do really big pieces, I do them strips by strips - so you have to paste, you have to involve people. It's a whole process. And I like that. For me, that's where the artwork is.

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.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

I love ensemble work. I love making pieces and building things together.

When a sketch comes into this three-dimensional form and everybody contributes, it's really fantastic.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.

Being in the same room with people and creating something together is a good thing.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

When you get the right people together, writing music becomes very effortless.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

I haven't really got a green thumb, but I love gardens and their architecture.

Working improvisationally in my studio with dancers, it's completely different. We don't have any starting point; we don't have an end point. We don't have anything we are trying to show or do. The picture evolves from nowhere.

'Cop Car' was made with all of my friends. I wrote it with my best friend.

My philosophy on choreography is that the making of a ballet is a team effort, and we're in this together. It's not me hammering on them. It's more about how we can elevate this piece collectively to something great.