“Offering,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″

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

Michael Kimmelman:  You studied art in school.  You started collecting early.

David Bowie:  Yeah, I collected very early on.  I have a couple of Tintorettos, which I’ve had for many, many years.  I have a Rubens.  Art was, seriously, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to own.  It has always been for me a stable nourishment.  I use it.  It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.  The same work can change me in different ways, depending on what I’m going through.  For instance, somebody I like very much is Frank Auerbach.  I think there are some mornings that if we hit each other a certain way – myself and a portrait by Auerbach – the work can magnify the kind of depression I’m going through.  It will give spiritual weight to the angst.  Some mornings I’ll look at it and go:  “Oh, God, Yeah!  I know!”  But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me the incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist.  I can look at it and say:  “My God, Yeah!  I want to sound like that looks.”

“At Heart an Artist with Many Muses,” by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, Friday, January 15, 2016

Comments are welcome!