With “Poseur,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 70” x 50,” 2019

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

[John] Graham told Lee [Krasner] and Jackson [Pollock] they were at the most wonderful part of their artistic journey because they were unknown and therefore free, and that there was only one thing they had to dread:  fame.

 How many men of great talent on their way to remarkable achievement in the present day are ruthlessly destroyed by critics, dealers, and public while mediocre, insensitive hacks, who by intrigue and industrious commercial effort have gained recognition and success, will go down in history with their inane creations.  Success, fame, and greatness coincide very seldom.  The great are not recognized during their life-time… Poe, Van Gogh,Rembrandt, Cezanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and others could not make even a miserable living out of their art.

 As Graham described it, true art could never be of the world because it was always steps, decades, light-years ahead of it.  Artists, therefore, had no need to be part of the world, either.  Their only duty was to persevere.  Humanity, he said, depended on it.

Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women

Comments are welcome!