Patrick Dougherty Quotations

My perspective on public art is that it needs to be site specific - it needs to fit its site,

The idea of developing the grounds so there's a sculpture park where people can have conversations with artists is great. People talked with me while I was working, and that gave them a real sense of the work ethic you have to have to be an artist. Just seeing someone physically making art is really educational.

Sticks are something we all have in common. Everybody knows sticks - the twigs and branches picked up on grandfather's farm; the branches woven in grandmother's basket. Somewhere threaded in all the public mass is a common thread, and that thread is the human spirit.

There are six different things that conflict, ... And some of them are in the same paragraph.

I must be a public artist. I work in public, and I capitalize on the drama of building.

My affinity for trees as a material seems to come from a childhood spent wandering the forest around Southern Pines - a place with thick underbrush and many intersecting lines evident in the bare winter branches of trees.