I found two wonderful pages in Blazwick, I., Wilson, S. and Tate Modern (eds) (2000) Tate Modern: the handbook. London: Tate Gallery Publ. while I was reading about Land Art and Richard Long. I wanted to record the exact quotes so have copied them below, highlighting what particularly stood out to me.
Then the sun rose and was so dazzling I found it impossible to see. The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began work in a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water ... I can't begin to describe a day as wonderful as this. One marvel after another, each lasting less than five minutes, it was enough to drive one mad. Claude Monet Letter to Alice Monet, London, 3 February 1901
I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature, but that with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my sense. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature. Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, now more to the left. Paul Cézanne Letter to his son, Aix-en-Provence, 8 September 1906
The continual anxiety of the painter makes him observe nature constantly with all its cortege of details, of variations, of disintegration of objects ... The painter devours nature with his eyes and at the moment of painting he sees it only intuitively, nature appears on his canvas from the depths of his being which digests all this spiritual nourishment. André Derain The notes of André Derain, 1920s
Physical nature in the true sense no longer exists. It has become the foundation of apartment blocks, and the asphalt of pavements and streets. Physical nature is nothing but a memory, like a tale about something marvellous that has long since disappeared. The Factory-Town dominates everything. Perpetual movement, endless coming and going, nightmarish and confused visions of the city follow one after the other. In the daylight which is obscured by houses, in the light created by the electric suns of the night, life appears completely different to us ... The world has been transformed into a monstrous, fantastic, perpetually moving machine; into an enormous automatic organism, inanimate, a gigantic whole constructed on a strict correspondence and balance of parts. Alexander Shevchenko Neo-Primitivism: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievements, 1913
When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist ... The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms, are the result of all this. It is certain that the evolution of the means of locomotion and their speed have a great deal to do with the new way of seeing. Fernand Léger Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914
The art of Painting is the decomposition of nature's ready-made images into the distinctive properties of the common material found within them and the creation of different images by means of the interrelation of these properties; this interrelation is established by the Creator's individual attitude ... nature is a 'Subject' as much as any subject set for painting in abstracto and is the point of departure, the seed, from which a Work of Art develops. Olga Rozanova The Bases of the New Creation, 1913
I expressed myself by means of nature. But if you carefully observe the sequence of my work, you will see that it progressively abandoned the naturalistic appearance of things and increasingly emphasized the plastic expression of relationships. Piet Mondrian Dialogue on the New Plastic, 1919
The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art ... The plumb-line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass ... we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner The Realistic Manifesto, 1920
I believe that men will long continue to feel the need of following to its source the magical river flowing from their eyes, bathing with the same hallucinatory light and shade both the things that are and the things that are not. Not always quite knowing to what the disturbing discovery is due, they will place one of these springs high above the summit of any mountain. The region where the charming vapours of the as yet unknown, with which they are to fall in love, condense, will appear to them in a lightning-flash. André Breton Surrealism and Painting, 1928
The consciousness and understanding of volume and mass, laws of gravity, contour of the earth under our feet, thrusts and stresses of internal structure, space displacement and space volume, the relation of man to a mountain and man's eye to the horizon, and all laws of movement and equilibrium - these are surely the very essence of life, the principles and laws which are the vitalization of our experience, and sculpture a vehicle for projecting our sensibility to the whole existence. Barbara Hepworth Sculpture, 1937
The man who wants to shoot a cloud down with an arrow will exhaust all his arrows in vain. Many sculptors are such strange hunters. What you have to do is fiddle something on a drum or drum something on a fiddle. Before long the cloud will descend, roll about on the ground in happiness, and at last complacently turn to stone.
Jean Arp The Man Who Wants to Shoot a Cloud Down, 1956
The 'sublime' ... is nowhere more pronounced than in Clyfford Still's vast canvases, whose jagged abstract shapes evoke awesome forms of nature: mountainous peaks, crevasses, torrential cataracts, and flaming holocausts.
Ellen H. Johnson American Artists on Art, 1982
Pollock's choice of enormous canvases served many purposes ... his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings and became environments. Before a painting, our size as spectators, in relation to the size of the picture, profoundly influenced how much we are willing to give up consciousness of our temporal existence while experiencing it. Pollock's choice of great sizes resulted in our being con-fronted, assaulted, sucked in.
Allan Kaprow The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, 1958
For me space is where I can feel all four horizons, not just the horizon in front of me and in back of me because then the experience of space exists only as volume ... Anyone standing in front of my paintings must feel the vertical domelike vaults encompass him to awaken an awareness of his being alive in the sensation of complete space.
Barnett Newman Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler, 1962
In the realm of the blue air more than anywhere else one feels that the world is accessible to the most unlimited reverie ... The world is ... on the far side of an unsilvered mirror, there is an imaginary beyond, a beyond pure and insubstantial, and that is the dwelling place of Bachelard's beautiful phrase: 'First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue.'
Yves Klein Sorbonne Lecture, 1959
The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of pre-historic material that is entombed in the Earth's crust. When one scans the ruined sites of prehistory one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits.
Robert Smithson A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, 1968
The Fibonacci series ... is based on a very simple idea. Each number adds up with or involves the preceding number in the formation of the following one ... Written in sequence, this makes 1,1,2,3. Then three adds up with two to form five; five with three to form the number eight. Thus, the sequence extends, while rapidly widening, like the growth of a living organism ... the microscopy of the dilation renews the organic ferment of development as proliferation. They pour space into a larger space which is infinite space.
Mario Merz The Fibonacci Series, 1971
There is no reason not to imagine a ... term ... that would be both landscape and architecture ... The expanded field is ... generated by problematizing the set of oppositions between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended ... as we can see, sculpture is no longer the privileged middle term between two things that it isn't. Sculpture is rather only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities... the possible combination of landscape and non-landscape began to be explored in the late 1960s. The term marked sites is used to identify work like Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) ... and many others. But in addition to actual physical manipulations of sites, this term also refers to other forms of marking. These might operate through the application of impermanent marks ... Or through the use of photography.
Rosalind Krauss Sculpture in the Expanded Field, 1979
If the only rule is that art must use what uses it, then one should not be put off by the generally high level of idiocy, politics and propaganda attached to public monuments - especially if one is in the business of erecting them. Should the government/industry sponsorship of art as land reclamation be enthusiastically welcomed by artists? Every large strip mine could support an artist in residence. Flattened mountain tops await the aesthetic touch. Dank and noxious acres of spoil piles cry out for some redeeming sculptural shape. Bottomless industrial pits yawn for creative filling - or deepening.
Robert Morris Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation, 1980
My art is about working in the wide world, wherever, on the surface of the earth. My art has the themes of materials, ideas, movement, time. The beauty of objects, thoughts, places and actions. My work is about my senses, my instinct, my own scale and my own physical commitment. My work is real, not illusory or conceptual. It is about real stones, real time, real actions...My outdoor sculptures and walking locations are not subject to possession and ownership. I like the fact that roads and mountains are common, public land. My outdoor sculptures are places. The material and the idea are of the place; sculpture and place are one and the same.
Richard Long Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks, 1980
I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the druids, who are called after the oak. Druid means oak. They used their oaks to define their holy places. I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future. The tree planting enterprise provides a very simple but radical possibility for this when we start with the seven thousand oaks.
Joseph Buys Interview with Richard Demarco, 1982
I make landscapes, or cityscapes as the case may be, to study the process of settlement as well as to work out for myself what the kind of picture (or photograph) we call a 'landscape' is. This permits me also to recognize the other kinds of picture with which it has necessary connections, or the other genres that a landscape might conceal within itself.
Jeff Wall About Making Landscapes, 1995
The rampant beauty of Gursky's photographs culminates in his interiors of factories or stock exchanges. That these places of labor, of alienation and of the most cynically disembodied business could provide an opportunity for unparalleled visual delight, even ahead of 'nature', is a paradox.
Jean-Pierre Criqui On the Melancholy of Vantage Points, 1995
Gardening activity is of five kinds, namely, sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. In so far as gardening is an Art, all these may be taken under the one head, composing.
lan Hamilton Finlay More Detached Sentences on Gardening in the Manner of Shenstone, 1985