Faith & Spirit Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s line reads like a confession smuggled out of the studio: not inspiration as a lightning bolt, but dread as a power source. The daily refrain - "Oh God what am I going to do with myself" - isn’t just creative block; it’s existential panic dressed in ordinary time. He’s describing a ritual of self-interrogation where the worst-case scenario isn’t failure, it’s vacancy: the possibility that beneath the role of “artist” there’s nothing solid, no self that holds without the work.

The psychological mechanics are almost perverse, and that’s why it lands. Fear usually freezes. Kapoor’s twist is to harness it as propulsion. “The emptiness that it implies” does double duty: it names both the blank interior (the self as hollow) and the formal language that has defined much of his practice - voids, cavities, negative space, the lure of depth you can’t quite verify. His sculptures often operate like traps for perception: you look into a dark concavity and the mind supplies meaning, scale, even danger. In the quote, he admits he’s subject to the same dynamic. Emptiness is intolerable, so it becomes generative.

There’s also an edge of discipline here, a refusal of the romantic myth that artists create from abundance. Kapoor’s subtext is closer to compulsion: keep moving, keep making, because stopping would force a confrontation with the void the work is designed to hold at bay. The studio becomes not a sanctuary, but a negotiated truce with nothingness.