Category Archives: Art in general
My blog turns 5 years old today! Here is the very first post from July 15, 2012. Q: What does it take to be an artist, especially one living and working in New York?
Barbara’s Studio with works in progress.
A: The three Big P’s – Patience, Persistence, and Passion. Without all three you will not have the stamina to work tirelessly for very little external reward. You can expect help from no one.
There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? Above all it’s about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts and love of our hard-fought creative process.
And, my God, it even gets harder as we get older! So what do we do? We dig in that much deeper. It’s a most noble and sacred calling – you know when you have it – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we are all true heroes!
If you were to visit my studio now, you would see more tables chock full of pastels and notice other changes from the photo above. Most importantly though, what I wrote five years ago still rings true!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 255
Barbara at work on “The Storyteller”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… several basic assumptions I have about the need for authenticity:
- Because in the end there is no other kind of art.
- I could have used the word ‘originality,” rather than authenticity, if the word’s root in “origin,” as in, “from the depth or source,” is recognized. However, the word implies a certain newness, “never done before,” that authenticity does not, and art in general does not need, in order to be deeply personal.
- Something that is authentic “rings true” for us. It comes from an inner truth. We draw from a source that is inner-directed rather than outer-directed, to use Maslow’s expression about self-actualization.
- Creating work that is authentic has a sacredness about it. It may be a way out – a small way perhaps, but at least a personal way – of a social dynamic that is all economics, consumerism, greed, and disregard for inner life. The word “science” comes from a root meaning “to separate.” Our cultural world view has been deeply influenced by that. Anything that we come to authentically in our artistic expression demands a personal inner synthesis. It is experience and insight won firsthand. The more we assimilate our “experience” from the advertising/media/consumer/government perspective the less authentic it will be.
- Most of what we express creatively is prelinguistic. The deeper insights are obviously coming from somewhere. They are not logically structured in the mind, but it may take logic to get them expressed.
- Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to the world if you paint or dance or write. The world can probably get by without your efforts. But that is not the point. The point is what the inner process of following your creative process will do, to you. It is clearly abut process. Love the work, love the process. Our fascination will pull our attention forward. That, also, will fascinate the viewer.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 254
“Survivors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″ image, 28 1/2″ x 35″ framed
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
An artist learns by repeated trial and error, by an almost moral instinct, to avoid the merely or the confusingly decorative, to eschew violence where it is a fraudulent substitute for power, to say what he has to say with the most direct and economical means, to be true to his objects, to his materials, to his technique, and hence, by a correlated miracle, to himself.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 246
“Offering,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Is love, taken together with art, not the only license to surpass the human conditions and to be greater, more generous, more unhappy, if necessary, than common man? Let us embrace the possibility heroically – let us renounce none of the advantages afforded to us by our animated state.
The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 245
Barbara’s studio with works in progress
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Just as a puppy dog strives to become nothing but simply a dog and as thoroughly a dog as possible, one has to grow into art as the mode of existence for which one’s heart and lungs were made, as the only appropriate option. If one chances upon art from the outside, it ends up being nothing but a bad disguise, and life, in its unshakeable honesty, takes it upon itself to tear off this masquerade.
The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 244
Great Falls, VA
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Poet or painter, musician or architect, all solitary individuals at bottom turn to nature because they prefer the eternal to the transient, the profound rhythms of eternal laws to that which finds justification in passing. Since they cannot persuade nature to share in their experience they consider their task to grasp nature in order to place themselves somewhere in its vast contexts. And with these single solitary individuals all of humanity approaches nature. It is not the ultimate and possibly most peculiar value of art that it constitutes the medium in which man and landscape, figure and world encounter and find each other. But in the painting, the building, the symphony – in a word, in art itself, they seem to join together as if in a higher, prophetic truth, to rely on one another, and it is as if they completed each other to become that perfect unity that characterizes the work of art.
The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 243
Self portrait, White Sands, NM
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Art is not a making-oneself-understood but an urgent understanding-of-oneself. The closer you get in your most intimate and solitary contemplation or imagination (vision), the more has been achieved, even if no one else were to understand it.
The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 238
Self-portrait with “Blue Misterioso”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Form is certainty. All nature knows this, and we have no greater advisor. Clouds have forms, porous and shape-shifting, bumptious, fleecy. They are what clouds need to be, to be clouds. See a flock of them come, on the sled of the wind, all kneeling above the blue sea. And in the blue water, see the dolphin built to leap, the sea mouse skittering; see the ropy kelp with its air-filled bladders tugging it upward; see the albatross floating day after day on its three-jointed wings. Each form sets a tone, enables a destiny, strikes a note in the universe unlike any other. How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 236
“Some Things We Regret,” 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.
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives, it does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healng and not all scars are ugly.
Olivia Laing in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 213
Matisse Book Cover
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
I am astonished by the accuracy with which Matisse remembers the most trifling facts; he describes a room that he went into forty years ago and gives you the measurements, where every piece of furniture stood, how the light fell. He is a man of astounding precision and has little time for anything that he has not confirmed for himself. In art matters, he is not the sort to go looking for a profile fortuitously created by cracks in the wall. Elie Faure writes that Matisse is perhaps the only one of his contemporaries (in particular Marquet and Bonnard) to know exactly where he comes from and the only one who never allows it to show “because his inveterate, invincible, vigilant willpower is always focused on being himself and nothing but.”
Matisse neglects nothing. He seems to know as much about the art market as about painting.
So many stratagems to sell a painting, from intimidating the purchaser to seeming to avoid him: Vollard used them all and used them successfully. Not least the lies that he told to reassure the client. “It works like this,” says Matisse: “To make a sale, you invent lies that have somehow disappeared into thin air by the time the deal is done.”
We talk of the difficulties faced by dealers hoping to gain access to Renoir in his Cagnes residence. Renoir didn’t like having people talk to him about selling his work,” says Matisse: “It bored him. About the only one who got a foot in the door was Paul Guillaume; he dressed up as a young worker with a floppy necktie: “You see, I’m a local. I’ve always loved your painting. I’ve just inherited a little money; I’d like to buy something.”
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut, translated by Chris Miller
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