Category Archives: Art in general
Q: Do you have any favorite memories of visiting museums when you were a child?
Calder’s circus at the new Whitney Museum of American Art
A: Yes, I loved seeing Alexander Calder’s wire circus at the Whitney Museum of American Art when I was a child. The circus, and the charming movie that he made with his long-suffering wife (to me she always looked bored and embarrassed that her husband was playing with his toys!) used to be on permanent display in a glass case on the ground floor. For many years Calder’s circus was in storage.
How thrilling to see it again, when the new Whitney Museum opened in May, just blocks from my apartment! Now any day of the week I can visit Calder’s circus – and other favorite works that have not been on exhibit for many years!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 150
Tile worker, South India
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
You wait for your eye to sort of “turn on,” for the elements to fall into place and that ineffable rush to occur, a feeling of exultation when you look through that ground glass, counting ever so slowly, clenching teeth and whispering to Jessie to holdstillholdstillholdstill and just knowing that it will be good, that it is true. Like the one true sentence that Hemingway writes about in A Moveable Feast, that incubating purity and grace that happens, sometimes, when all the parts come together.
And these pictures have come quickly, in a rush… like some urgent bodily demand. They have been obvious, they have been right there to be taken, almost like celestial gifts.
Sally Mann in Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
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Q: Were there any other artists in your family?
“The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38,” 2013
A: Unfortunately, I have not been able to reconstruct my family tree further back than two generations. So as far as I can tell, I am the first artist of any sort, whether musician, actor, dancer, writer, etc. in my family.
Both sets of grandparents emigrated to the United States from Europe. On my mother’s side my Polish grandparents died by the time my mother was 16, years before I was born.
My paternal grandparents both lived into their 90s. My father’s mother spoke Czech, but since I did not, it was difficult to communicate. I never heard any stories about the family she left behind. My grandfather spoke English, but I don’t remember him ever talking about his childhood or telling stories about his former life. My most vivid memories of my grandfather are seeing him in the living room watching Westerns on an old-fashioned television.
Sometimes I am envious of artists who had parents, siblings, or extended family who were artists. How I would have loved to grow up with a family member who was an artist and a role model!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 149
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.
Real collecting begins in lust: I have to have this, live with this, learn from this, figure out how to pay for this. It cannot be about investment or status. Like making art, writing about it or organizing its public display (in galleries or in museums), collecting is a form of personal expression. It is, in other words, a way to know yourself, and to participate in and contribute to creativity, which is essential to human life on earth.
Roberta Smith in Collecting for Pleasure, Not Status, The New York Times, May 15, 2015
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Pearls from artists* # 148
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.
I want Bob Iger, the head of Disney, to invest in my ideas. In fact … one of my ideas is … I love Walt Disney … I feel Disney should have an art fund that completely supports all of the arts. And I feel that there should be a responsibility, recruiters, constantly looking for new thinkers and connecting them directly to companies that already work. Why does the person who has the most genius idea or cultural understanding or can create the best art have to figure out how to become a businessman in order to become successful at expressing himself? I think it’s important for anyone that’s in power to empower.
Kanye West in Choice Quotes from Kanye’s Address at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Hyperallergic, May 12, 2015
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Q: How do you document your work?
Barbara’s portfolio book
A: I have been a professional artist for thirty years so some things have changed and some haven’t. I have a portfolio book of 8 x 10 photographs of all my pastel paintings. Since my process is slow and meticulous, the latest, “Troublemaker,” is pastel painting number 124.
I have always gotten my work professionally photographed. Until 2001 my husband Bryan was my photographer and since then I have hired three people. To document older work I have slides, 4 x 5 transparencies, and color and black and white 4 x 5 negatives. I continued with slides and film longer than many artists, but finally switched to digital files a few years ago when buying film and processing it became difficult.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 147
Alexandria, Virginia living room
* 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 working, every day… on new photographs. This body of work, family pictures, is beginning to take on a life of its own. Seldom, but memorably, there are times when my vision, even my hand, seems guided by, well, let’s say a muse. There is at that time an almost mystical rightness about the image: about the way the light is enfolding, the way the [kids’] eyes have taken on an almost frightening intensity, the way there is a sudden, almost outer-space-like, quiet.
These moments nurture me through the reemergence into the quotidian… through the bill paying and the laundry and the shopping for soccer shoes, although I am finding that I am becoming increasingly distant, like I am somehow living full time in those moments.
Sally Mann in Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 145
“Stalemate,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* 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 a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his work. It releases tension needed for his job. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of conceptions evolved in terms of logic and words.
But though the nonlogical, instinctive, subconscious part of the mind must play its part in his work, he also has a conscious mind which is not inactive. The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organizes memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.
Henry Moore: Notes on Sculpture in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
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Pearls from artists* # 144
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.
Art and design are rule-based. This flies in the face of everything that most people have been taught before, namely, that art and design are about freedom. I remember reading a wonderful analogy about this concept many years ago in an out-of-print, early twentieth-century book on design. The author asked us to imagine a flying kite – the quintessential emblem of unrestricted, spontaneity, soaring in the wind. Keeping taught the line between you and the kite, however, is the source of that freedom. Here’s another way of putting it: “Creativity arises out of the tension between the rules and imagination.”
Leslie Hirst in The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice, Rosanne Somerson and Mara L. Hermano, editors
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Pearls from artists* # 143
“Intruder,” 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.
Artists and designers have the capacity to generate something from deep inside ourselves to live outside of ourselves. By residing in the experiential and the physical, and by developing the “hands on” as a portal of intelligent learning, we confirm the mind as maker and making as a state of mindfulness. We demonstrate how artists and designers are hosts for enduring creative discovery that is self-initiated and actively engaged. In short, artists and designers manifest what has not existed previously – in many cases, what has never even been imagined.
Rosanne Somerson in The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice, Rosanne Somerson and Mara L. Hermano, editors
Comments are welcome!
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