Monthly Archives: March 2020
Pearls from artists* # 394
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Dear Person Reading This,
A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you’re away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.
You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.
You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…
Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.
Go and look for it.
Neil Gaiman
A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 393
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… Fernhoffer’s a man in love with our art, a man who sees higher and farther than other painters. He’s meditated on the nature of color, on the absolute truth of line, but by dint of so much research, he has come to doubt the very object of his investigations. In moments of despair, he claims that drawing doesn’t exist and that lines are only good for rendering geometrical figures, which is far from the truth, since with line and with black, which is not a color, we can create a human figure. There’s your proof that our art is like nature itself, composed of an infinity of elements: drawing accounts for the skeleton, color supplies life, but life without a skeleton is even more deficient than a skeleton without life. Lastly, there’s something even truer than all this, which is that practice and observation are everything to a painter; so that if reasoning and poetry argue with our brushes, we wind up in doubt, like our old man here, who’s as much a lunatic as he is a painter — a sublime painter who had the misfortune to be born into wealth, which has allowed him to wander far and wide. Don’t do that to yourself! A painter should philosophize only with a brush in his hand!
Honore Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 392
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Dear Person,
Why read?
Because you only have one life but reading gives you many lives. Because you only have one personality but when you read a book you can be inside another mind and heart. Because experiencing elegance of language is one of the greatest pleasures of consciousness. Reading lets you be quiet in a chaotic world and commune with amazing people who may happen to be dead now, so not too easy to connect with otherwise. Reading startles you. Reading upsets you. Reading takes apart your world and expectations and rearranges them. Imagine the last few years without the books you have loved – it would be a much flatter, sadder experience of living. We read as a form of faith.
Naomi Wolf
A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick
Comments are welcome!