Barbara’s studio

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

… we’re plagued by the certainty that we haven’t quite achieved what we’d hoped we could.  The work is only as good as our small, imperfect, pedestrian selves can make it.  It exists in some idealized form, just out of reach.  And so we push on.  Driven by a desire to get it right, and the suspicion that there is no getting it right, we do our work in the hopes of coming close.  There’s no room in this process for an overblown ego.  A career – whether it takes us to Cap d’Antibes or to the Staybridge Suites off the interstate – can be the result, but if it’s the goal, we’ve lost before we’ve even begun.

Dani Shapiro in Still Writing:  The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

Comments are welcome!