Category Archives: An Artist’s Life
Travel photo of the month*
*Favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
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Pearls from artists* # 477
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Although he produced thousands of works of art in his pitifully short time on earth, Vincent [van Gogh] – as, following his own example, we shall call him – failed to sell a single painting in his lifetime, despite the fact that his brother Theo was a prominent Paris art dealer who, among other business coups, made a fortune for Claude Monet. Although he suffered through periods of deepest doubt, Vincent knew that one day his work would be recognized for its true worth. All the same, he could not have dreamed that his jarringly revolutionary paintings would one day rise so high in popular regard.
John Banville in His Own Worst Enemy, The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2021
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Pearls from artists* # 476
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
For a great many artists solitude is the time when they feel most real and alive. It is when they have their most intense experiences, when they can vicariously live out any adventure, any dream. Tennessee Williams said, “I’m only really alive when I’m writing.” The painter Robert Motherwell wrote, “I feel most real to myself in the studio.” The young, exuberant Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff exclaimed at the end of the last century:
In the studio all distinctions disappear. One has neither name nor family; one is no longer the daughter of one’s mother, one is oneself and individual, and one has before one art, and nothing else. One feels so happy, so free, so proud!
We may think of his aliveness as the accumulation of al the above-listed benefits, as the artist working out her life, manifesting her creativity, suiting her personality, playing, avoiding unwanted social interactions, working authentically and integrity, living intensely – as the artist being her grandest self.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 475
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In order to warm the artist’s heart, it’s necessary to assert that he is doing good work. Random or wrong-headed praise won’t do the trick, but will only exacerbate the artist’s feeling that he is unseen and misunderstood.
Even wrong-headed praise is the exception rather than the rule in the artist’s search for recognition. More often than not your recognition will consist of criticism, not praise. You may be criticized for not attempting work you have no desire to attempt, for pandering to mass taste, for working too exotically or too narrowly… You may be attacked in a mixed review that purports to praise you. In short, you may be criticized for everything and anything under the sun.
Can you escape this criticism as you struggle for recognition? No. The journalist Elbert Hubbard said, “To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” … you can’t escape criticism, you can’t tame your critics.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and performing Artists
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Q: What makes you drawn to face masks?
A: For me a mask is so much more than a mask. It is almost a living thing with its own soul and with a unique history. I always wonder, who created this mask? For what purpose? Where has it been? What stories would it tell if it could? In my current “Bolivianos” series I feel as though I am creating portraits of living, or perhaps once living, beings.
In a way the masks are a pretext for a return to my early days as an artist. When I resigned my Naval commission to pursue art full time, I started out as a photo-realist portrait painter. The twist is that this time I do not have to satisfy a client’s request to make my subjects look younger or more handsome. I am joyfully free to respond only to the needs of the pastel painting before me on the easel.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 474
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If ever an artist needed a degree of protection against his public, surely it is Vincent van Gogh. Reproductions of his most emblematic paintings, especially the gyrating nightscapes and the blazing series of sunflower studies made in his late years, adorn countless bedrooms, living rooms, and bathrooms all across what used to be known as the developed world. The popularity of the works executed in the great flowering of this last period, which began around the time of his revelatory visit in the autumn of 1885 to the newly completed Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, and ended when he died less than five years later at the age of thirty-seven, is unparalleled. Of the great ones among his contemporaries, and there were many, only Degas can come near to rivaling him as a mainstay of interior decoration.
John Banville in His Own Worst Enemy, The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2021
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Travel photo of the month*
*Favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 472
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
A remark by Kurt Anderson suggests how the Internet discourages patient gazing: “Waiting a while to get everything you want… was a definition of maturity. Demanding satisfaction right this instant, on the other hand, is a defining behavior of seven-year-olds. The powerful appeal of the Web is not just the ‘community’ it enables but its instantane-ity… as a result… delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary.” A survey commissioned by the Visitor Studies Association reveals the impact of impatience. On average, the survey found, Americans spend between six and ten seconds looking at individual works in museums. (Is it just a coincidence that six to ten seconds is also the average time browsers perch on any given Web page?) Yet how many hours a day do we spend absorbed by one or another electronic screen? For the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha (born 1937) brief encounters won’t suffice. When somebody asked, “How can you tell good art from bad?” Ruscha replied, “With a bad work you immediately say, ‘Wow!’ But afterwards, you think, ‘Hum? Maybe not.’ With a good work, the opposite happens.” Time is lodged at the heart of Ruscha’s formula, as the artwork becomes part of our temporal experience. In order to know what is good, we need to take a breather. Even to know what is bad, we need to pause.
Arden Reed in Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell
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Remembering Bryan on the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
Please read about our beautiful life together here http://findingfifteen.com/sample-chapter/
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Q: How did your ebook “From Pilot to Painter” come to be? (Question from “Arte Realizzata”)
A: It was my longtime assistant, Barbra Drizin’s, idea and more than I’d care to admit, I was resistant. I said, “I am much too busy to write an ebook!” Barbra went on to explain that we could start with material I had already written for my blog, expand on it, add reproductions of my pastel paintings, etc. With her persuasion, I agreed! Barbra made the initial selections and together we added and revised text, organized the material, and worked out countless details. I asked my friend, Ann Landi, to write a foreword and Barbra found an editor to put everything into Amazon’s ebook format.
Now I am extremely pleased that my ebook FROM PILOT TO PAINTER is available not only on Amazon, but also on iTunes. It is based on my blog and is part memoir, including the loss of my husband on 9/11, insights into my creative practice, and intimate reflections on what it’s like to be an artist living in New York City. The ebook includes material not found on the blog, plus 25+ reproductions of my vibrant pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, a Foreword by Ann Landi, the founder of Vasari21.com and longtime critic for ARTnews, and more.
Comments are welcome!
