Category Archives: An Artist’s Life
Pearls from artists* # 314
“He Just Stood There Grinning,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
*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 Leonora Carrington and many of her ‘sister’ surrealists, surrealism provided the intellectual, political and artistic milieu that enabled them to come into their own as artists and writers, and to gain recognition for their work in the wider world. Although some of these women had accepted their roles as muses in the lives of male artists, none believed that life as a muse trumped life as an artist. Asked in 1983 how she felt about the male surrealists’ view of women as muses, Leonora offered her testy, if retrospective rejoinder: ‘I thought it was bullshit… I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.’ It is as artists and friends that we remember the women of surrealism today.
Whitney Chadwick in The Militant Muse: Love, War, and the Women of Surrealism
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you feel about donating your work to auctions?
Studio with work in progress
A: Generally, it depends on who is doing the asking. If it’s an organization that has been supportive of my work, I am pleased to help with fundraising. If the organization and I have never connnected before, their out-of-the-blue request sometimes feels disrespectful. Artists invest decades, vast amounts of money, and plenty of blood, sweat, and tears to become the skilled creators that we are. And a New York artist’s overhead is considerable. I know of no artists who create their hard-fought work only to give it away.
Under certain conditions, however, I will participate. Here is my response to a recent donation request.
Dear…
Thank you for contacting me. Certainly your organization sounds worthwhile.
However, you may be unaware that artists may deduct ONLY the cost of materials when we give our work to auctions. I suggest that you ask one of your supporters to buy a pastel painting and donate it next year (there is a one-year waiting period for collectors to take this tax deduction). Then we have a win-win-win! I get paid, the collector/donor gets to enjoy owning my beautiful work for a year AND take a tax deduction for the full amount that he/she paid for it. Plus, your organization gets to sell my painting at next year’s auction.
Don’t you agree this is a better approach for everyone involved?
Sincerely…
Comments are welcome!
Q: How much of your work is autobiographical?
“The Champ,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
A: I suppose all of it is, in the sense that often I can look at a particular pastel painting and remember what was happening in my life when I made it. As I get older, however, it’s becoming more difficult to remember the circumstances surrounding my earliest work. Certainly, the cultures of an ever-expanding number of countries – Bolivia last year – are influencing my imagery for the better.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have a favorite painting among all the work you have created?
”Shamanic,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20”
A: Generally, it’s the last one I completed, perhaps because it encapsulates everything I’m currently thinking about. At the moment my favorite is “Shamanic.”
I believe all of my prior experience in and out of the studio has contributed to making me a better artist and also a better person. So whichever work I finished last, seems the best somehow, and it’s also my favorite.
I wonder, do other artists feel this way, too?
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 306
New York, NY
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.
Artists do this by keeping their curiosity and moral sense alive, and by sharing with us their gift for metaphor. Often this means finding similarities between observable fact and inner experience – between birds in a vacant lot, say, and an intuition worthy of Genesis.
More than anything else, beauty is what distinguishes art. Beauty is never less than mystery, but it has within it a promise.
In this way, art encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence.
Robert Adams in Art Can Help
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A: Would you agree that there are more opportunities for women artists these days?
At Salomon Arts in Tribeca
A: It’s true that there are more opportunities now for women artists. Indeed, there are more opportunities for ALL artists. Social media has helped immensely in that it allows artists to take charge of our own careers, making us less dependent on the approval, largesse, and/or validation of art world gatekeepers.
However, at the highest levels of our profession, there are many inequities. As more women become art museum directors, collectors of contemporary art, and leaders whose taste matters, the status of all female artists is bound to improve to become more aligned with that of males.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 305
About half of Barbara’s pastels
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When asked to talk about what I do, I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts – weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, cabinetmakers – people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.
Ursula K. Le Guin in No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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Travel photo of the month*
“The Three Wise Men,” Jimoh Buraimoh, Glass beads, plastic cylinders, cotton, epoxy, plywood, 1991
* Favorite travel and other photographs that have not yet appeared in this blog.
A: I saw this painting at the Baltimore Museum of Art and was intrigued by the intracacy and textures of the beads, cylinders, and other items used by Jimoh Buraimoh, a Nigerian modernist. The figures are his portrayal of the three men who traveled to England in 1960 to negotiate Nigeria’s independence. Buraimoh honors the nation’s founders with materials that glorify Yoruba heritage and artistic traditions. His title also associates the men with the three wise men of the Bible. I enjoy this work very much and couldn’t help being reminded of imagery by Picasso.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 304
“Palaver,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… my job as a fiction writer is to write fiction, not to review it. Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. (Or so it seems to me, which is why I have a problem with the kind of modern museum art that involves reading what the artist says about a work in order to find out why one should look at it or “how to experience” it).
Ursula K. Le Guin in No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 303
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.
If the majority of aesthetic works fail to astonish us, then. it may have something to do with the ingrained insensitivity that is part and parcel of contemporary life. It may also have something to do with the fact that art, as Solzhenitsyn said so eloquently, is constantly being put to uses that are at odds with its essence. Indeed, the moment a work of art appears, all kinds of other factors come into play. Cultural institutions, social pressures, laws, customs, fashions, and trends pull it in every direction. Fame, money, conformism, attention-seeking, and knee-jerk rebellion can lure artists to abandon their own vision in order to emulate those of others, to adhere to formulas and paint by numbers, or to value external convention over vision. The inevitable result is a lot of bad art that couldn’t astonish anyone. It should come as no surprise, when looking over the glut of aesthetic objects that proliferate around us, if we feel the need to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic art – which is to say, art that astonishes us by attuning us to the radical mystery of being, and art that attempts to reinforce our shared illusions, comforting or intimidating us with the notion that there is nothing to wonder at since everything has been figured out.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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