Category Archives: Art in general
Pearls from artists* # 596
Film still from “Barbara Rachko: True Grit,” Directed by Jennifer Cox, Moto Films LLC
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Being an artist is very hard work. Not only do you have to constantly develop your discipline, but if you have a desire to make a living, you have to be a good businessperson.
Agents, business managers, etc., etc., are not the authors of your career. They make suggestions. They are a part of your research team. You are the author. You are the center of your career. You have to run the show. I hope your show is about more than gold digging. I hope your show is about becoming the most engaging, enchanting, magical person that you can be – through your art. Art is ultimately transcendent. That’s a fact.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts – For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
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Pearls from artists* # 592
The 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.
There are millions of ways of composing and structuring artwork. Each piece, whether improvised or written down, danced or painted, can evolve its own structure, its own world. The word creative comes from “to make grow,” as in the act of cultivating plants. We grow or evolve a set of rules to incorporate the unfolding of our imagination. We create new rules of progression, fresh channels in which play can flow.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 591
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Like lîla, or divine creativity, art is a gift, coming from a place of joy, self-discovery, inner knowing. Play, intrinsically rewarding, doesn’t cost anything. As soon as you put a price on it, it becomes, to some extent, not play. Somewhere, therefore, we each have to map out for ourselves the tricky questions of money and the artist. This is a difficult issue because artists have to eat, equip themselves, and subsidize years of professional training. Yet the marketplace shifts our art at least to some degree out of the state of free play, and may in some cases contaminate it totally. Professional athletes face the same issues. Certainly they play to a great extent for love of their sport, but issues of money, prestige, and fame introduce a lot of non play as well.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 590
Barbara’s Studio: when you fall in love with pastel!
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We see again and again in the lives of special artists a profound youthful infatuation with their medium, with everything and anything connected with it – the good, the bad, the indifferent. If books have mesmerized them, they will read everything; if painting, they will frequent every gallery, running to every visiting show. They may have no idea that they are about to devote their life to that medium; they simply fell in love. The actor Len Cariou said:
“I didn’t have any thoughts about being an actor. I always was an actor. I’d go to films every Saturday. I had an insatiable appetite for films. You could see four films and a serial for half a buck. In 1959 when I read an ad in the local paper, ‘Young actors wanted for summer stock,’ all of a sudden I knew; there was a crunch in my head.”
… The artist is transported by his medium, is delighted and astonished. That his medium is able to speak to him in this way is almost a proof of the existence of god, or at least a special affirmation in the realm of the spirit.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 589
Barbara’s studio… where plenty of mistakes happen!
*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 school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don’t make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience cones from bad judgment.” But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.
Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable technique. But when a mistake occurs, we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 582
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Strange, but the artist has never made a fuss about being denied those estimable virtues other men would not do without: intellectuality, good judgment, a knowledge of the world, and rational conduct. It may be charged, that he has even fostered the myth. In his intimate journals Vollard tells us that Degas feigned deafness to escape disputations and harangues concerning things he considered false and distasteful. If the speaker or subject changed, his hearing immediately improved. We must marvel at his wisdom since he must have only surmised what we know definitely today: tThat the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth. It is understandable, then, how the artist might actually cultivate this moronic appearance, this deafness, this inarticulateness, in an effort to evade the million irrelevancies which daily accumulate concerning his work. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, edited by Christopher Rothko
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Pearls from artists* # 580
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.
Love is the spirit that motivates the artist’s journey. The love may be sublime, raw, obsessive, passionate, awful, or thrilling, but whatever its quality, it’s a powerful motive in the artist’s life. The actor Derek Jacobi distinguished this special deeply rooted drive from mere desire in the following way:
You have to have an absolute obsession and compulsion to act, not just desire; it’s just not enough to have talent and want to express it, it’s not enough. It’s got to be more deeply rooted, more abrasive. The fire in the belly has got to be there. If there’s no fire, you can’t do it.
What is it that the artist loves? It is first and foremost the sheer power of whatever medium has attracted him. This is why he’s an artist and not a botanist or an archeologist: an art form has gotten under his skin. It may be the power of the book that gripped him, the power of dance, the power of music, the power of the image, or the power of the play.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 574
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.
A creative life is risky business. To follow your own course, not patterned on parents, peers, or institutions, involves a delicate balance of tradition and personal freedom, a delicate balance of sticking to your guns and remaining open to change. While on some dimensions living a normal life, you are nevertheless a pioneer, breaking away from the molds and models that inhibit the heart’s desire, creating life as it goes. Being, acting, creating in the moment without props and supports, without security, can be supreme play, and it can also be frightening, the very opposite of play. Stepping into the unknown can lead to delight, poetry, invention, humor, lifetime friendships, self-realization, and occasionally a great creative breakthrough. Stepping into the unknown can also lead to failure, disappointment, rejection, sickness, or death.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 563
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
[John] Graham defined art as a “process of abstracting” thought and emotion by the use of paint or metal or stone. Because art was therefore intrinsically abstract, the duty of the artist would be to push abstraction “fearlessly to its logical end instead of evading it under the disguises of charm or being ‘true to nature.’” The artist created for society, he said, but if that society didn’t like what he or she had produced, the artist”does not trade his ideals for success. Martyrs and saints love luxury and success just as much as ordinary people, only they love something else even more.” Graham said, if the artist is a true genius, he can expect to be misunderstood and alone. “The beauty of genius is frightful to behold, few can envisage it. Others find subterfuge in scepticism.” The abstract artist, he said, would be repeatedly challenged by such skeptics asking, “‘What does it mean?’… Is it a sky, a house, a horse?’” To which they should respond with confidence and honesty, “‘No, it is a painting.’”
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* #561
*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 most powerful symbols draw profound reactions from us. The symbolic images in great art attract and fascinate us; they stir our souls and move us beyond what can be easily expressed; ‘their pregnant language cries out to us that they mean more than they say.’
The unconscious produces symbols as part of a natural process within us. These images emerge out of the context of our lived experience… Jung saw the meaning-making process as one that not only requires attendance to the real context of our lives and history, but also involves profound inner listening. It asks us to use our rational capacities, but also our feeling and imaginal ones.
Symbolic images redirect our psychic energy, bringing together conscious and unconscious material and producing the lessening of conflict. In this way, they activate a transcendent function within the psyche. We experience this as the discovery of personal meaning and healing. This transformation is not the result of formulaic operations, but rather is a dynamic process that requires our authentic and vulnerable participation. The process challenges the whole of who we are and requires deep moral effort. That the unconscious would produce moving, powerful compensatory symbols inside us at all points to a fact that our culture may not have fully grasped – that there is a force working within us which is always driving us towards healing growth and greater consciousness… Despite our suffering, the psyche is always ultimately seeking both a healthy homeostatic balance and our ever-unfolding growth and unique development.
Gary Bobroff in Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell
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