Road to Roden Crater in Arizona

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadily along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.  As in any profession, facility develops.  In most this is a decided advantage, and so it is with the actual facture of art; I notice with interest that my hand is more deft, lighter, as I grow more experienced.  But I find that I have to resist the temptation to fall into the same kind of pleasurable relaxation I once enjoyed with clay.  I have in some subtle sense to fight my hand if I am to grow along the reaches of my nerve.

And here I find myself faced with two fears.  The first is simply that of the unknown – I cannot know where my nerve is going until I venture along it.  The second is less sharp but more permeating:  the logical knowledge that the nerve of any given individual is as limited as the individual.  Under its own law, it may just naturally run out.  If this happens, the artist does best, it seems to me, to fall silent.  But by now the habit of work is so ingrained in me that I do not know if I could bear the silence.

Anne Truitt in Daybook:  The Journal of an Artist