Category Archives: Creative Process
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Preliminary drawing
A: I am ready to start a preliminary charcoal drawing as a study for my next pastel painting. It has been a while since I worked with the Mexican figures in the photo on the left. It’s like a reunion with dear friends!
Comments are welcome!
Start/Finish of “Poker Face,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″image, 50″ x 70″ framed
Preliminary charcoal sketch
Finished
Pearls from artists* # 219
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.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, the expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even need to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine satisfaction, a blessed unrest that keep us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 218
Untouched sandpaper
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Let go of every should or shouldn’t running through your mind when you start. Be willing to stand at the base of a new mountain, and with humility and grace, bow to it. Allow yourself to understand that it’s bigger than you, or anything you can possibly imagine. You’re not sure of your path. You’re not even sure where the next step will take you. When you begin, whisper to yourself: I don’t know.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Q: Start/Finish of “Epiphany,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″ image, 50″ x 70″ framed
Roughed out in charcoal
Finished, signed lower left
Pearls from artists* # 217
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.
This is true for most artists, not only writers.
What I do know – what I’ve spent the past couple of decades learning about myself – is that if I’m not writing, I’m not well. If I’m not writing, the world around me is slowly leached of its color. I am crabby with my husband, short-tempered with my kid and more inclined to see small things wrong with my house (the crack in the ceiling, the smudge prints along the staircase wall) than look out the window at the blazing maple tree, the family of geese making its way across our driveway. If I’m not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am continuing work on a large (58″ x 38″) pastel painting tentatively titled, “Blocked.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 215
Barbara’s easel
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Instead of a clean narrow pathway to a goal, creators take risks, seek out new experiences, and reconcile contradictions. Indeed this dance of contradictions is exactly what may give rise to the intense inner drive to create. As the journalist Carolyn Gregoire and I put it in our recent book Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, creative people have “messy minds.”
We wouldn’t have it any other way. Without these rebellious experts, these passionate meaning-makers, these doers and dreamers, we would be bereft of some of humanity’s greatest creative accomplishments. Creative geniuses reveal what is within human reach, what we may all be capable of achieving with the drive to make meaning and the courage to create.
Scott Barry Kaufman in “A Capacity for Genius,” Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart 50th Anniversary, July 22 – August 27, 2016 Playbill
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you decide what to paint next?
Work in progress
A: It’s interesting how my creative process is simplifying the longer I work at this. For my most recent piece, I looked at my old 20″ x 24″ c-prints until a particular image seemed to call out. It became my next project.
Comments are welcome!
Start/Finish of “Incognito,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″ image, 50″ x 70″ framed
C-print and preliminary charcoal sketch
Finished
Comments are welcome!
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