Category Archives: 2024
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress!
A: A 58” x 38” pastel painting in the early stages.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 617
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists’ pigments, like printers’ inks, have many uses apart from the creation of art. The advertising artist, the illustrator, the portraitist, the stylist, and the decorator all employ the plastic and pictorial devices of the artist. Yet their chief preoccupation, the purpose and function of their effort, is other than the creation of art. It is the commercial artist’s job to enhance the desirability of marketable goods. The illustrator vies with the written word in the description of places or facts and the reporting of events. The portraitist must flatter his patron, while the stylist and decorator adorn his figure, streamline his gadgets, and embellish his property. There may be a resemblance to the outward appearance of art. But the intrinsic relationship is no closer here than that which exists between the composition of birthday greetings, recipes, or advertising copy and the creations of the poet, though the identical phrase and syntax may be used in both.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Travel photo of the month*
Glass Teahouse by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Naoshima Island, Kagawa, Japan
*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 616
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
This may be the most important piece of advice I can give you: The Internet is nothing like a cigarette break. If anything, it’s the opposite. One of the most difficult practical challenges facing writers in this age of connectivity is the fact that the very instrument on which most of us write is also a portal to the outside world. I once heard Ron Carlson say that composing on a computer is like writing in an amusement park. Stuck for a nanosecond? Why feel it? With the single click of a key we can remove ourselves and take a ride on a log flume instead.
By the time we return to work – if, indeed, we return to our work at all – we will be further away from our deepest impulses rather than closer to them. Where were we? Oh, yes. We were stuck. We were feeling uncomfortable and lost. We have gained nothing in the way of waking-dream time. Our thoughts have not drifted, but rather, have ricocheted from one bright and shiny thing to another.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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Q: Do you have any rituals that you do before beginning a day’s work in the studio?
The Studio!
A: When I arrive at the studio in the morning it’s rare for me to immediately start working. Usually I read something art-related – books written by artists, about creativity, etc. At the moment I’m reading The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko. As usual I am struggling to understand aspects of the art business and figure out what I need to do next to get my work seen and collected by a wider audience. The Artist’s Reality reminds me why I decided to make art in the first place. It helps reconnect with temporarily forgotten parts of myself and is a much-needed reminder of what I love about being an artist, especially in light of the business side that is becoming so complex and demanding of attention now.
Balancing the creative and business aspects of being an artist is a continual struggle. Both are so important. An artist needs an appreciative audience – very few artists devote their lives to art-making so that the work will remain in a closet – but I also believe this (from a note I wrote years ago and tacked to the studio wall): “Just make the work. None of the rest matters.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 615
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
There are many artists and critics, including, but not only, Feminists, who have suggested that since “male” esthetic values predominated for centuries, it is impossible, and will be for a long time, to know what “women’s art” might be. I propose that the answer is at hand. The female voice was not lost, only not listened to.
Eleanor Munro in Originals: American Women Artists
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Q: Can you elaborate on the title of your very first series, “Domestic Threats”?
A: All of the paintings in this series are set in places where I reside or used to live, either a Virginia house or New York apartments, i.e., domestic environments. Each painting typically contains a conflict of some sort, at least one figure who is being menaced or threatened by a group of figures. So I named the series “Domestic Threats.”
Depending on what is going on in the country at a particular moment in time, however, people have seen political associations in my work. When my husband, Bryan, was killed on 9/11, many people thought the title, “Domestic Threats,” was prescient. They have ascribed all kinds of domestic terrorism associations to it, but that is not really what I had in mind. For a time some thought I was hinting at scenes of domestic violence, but that also is not what I had intended. “Domestic Threats” seems to be fraught with associations that I never considered, but it’s an apt title for this body of work.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 614
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The artist has accepted his fate with open eyes, and I do not believe that he wishes any charity in relation to his self-assumed sacrifice. He wants nothing but the understanding and love of what he does. There can be no other rewards. The foregoing therefore is not in the spirit of asking for a charitable contribution, but rather the clearing of the way for what is really the motivating factor for this strange phenomenon: the creation of art.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: This is my second day working on a new “Bolivianos” pastel painting. Next I will layer black Rembrandt soft pastels for the background. It usually takes 4 or 5 layers just to cover the 400 grit sandpaper.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 613
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.
A painting is a statement of the artist’s notions of reality in terms of plastic speech. In that sense the painter must be likened to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. For science is a statement of the laws that govern a specific phenomenon or category of matter or energy within the specified units and conditions of its operation. Philosophy, however, must combine all these specialized truths within a single system. It is because of this broad scope that Aristotle gives preeminence to the philosopher in the introduction to his Metaphysics, for he tells us that every man except the philosopher is an authority within his specific field, whereas the philosopher must have the acute knowledge that each man has in his own field plus the ability to relate all these fields to the operations of universality and eternity.
Therefore art, like philosophy, is of its own age; for the partial truths of each age differ from those of other ages, and the artist, like the philosopher, must constantly adjust eternity, as it were, to all the specifications of the moment. Art, too, creates at different times the notions of reality that the artist, as a man of the age, must inherit and develop and consider real along with the other intellectually conscious men of his time. His language, which is his plastic means, will also adjust itself to the possibility of making these notions manifest in their most coherent possibilities. The reality of the artist, therefore, reflects the understanding of his times, even as his creations shape those understandings. We posit this without wishing to attempt to untangle here the series of causes and effects, a process which would probably obscure more than it certified.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
Comments are welcome!
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