Category Archives: Inspiration
Pearls from artists* # 190
Working
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
For fifty years, I worked tirelessly, never looking up, interested in nothing but the organization of my own brain. And the works that came had their significance – which was just as well. Otherwise, I’d be a completely useless fellow.
Still, that’s not the point. The point is, I was lucky enough to be able to do fifty years’ work, until I was sixty-five. What happened was, I had to pay for it. It comes around for everyone. I’ve paid my dues!
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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Pearls from artists* # 189
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
* 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 no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.
Sylvia Ashton quoted in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists by Eric Maisel
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Pearls from artists* # 188
“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.
HM: In order to create a work of art, you need an artist, an object, the work, and the audience. Indeed, where there’s no audience, there’s no artist. Renoir used to say, “No painters in Hamlet.” meaning that on a desert island you wouldn’t paint.
( I confess I am a little surprised. For my part, I find it difficult to believe that the true artist cannot work without hope. It seems to me that art is first and foremost an internal necessity, a need to escape from life. It is true that this is closer to the mystics’ point of view and that the artist, if he does not work directly for his contemporaries, at least looks forward to some future resonance. Nonetheless, I ask the same question again.)
PC: Even a true painter wouldn’t paint on a desert island?
HM: No… Painting is a means of communication, a language. An artist is an exhibitionist. Take away his spectators and the exhibitionist slinks off with his hands in his pockets.
The audience is the material in which you work. You don’t see the face of the audience. It’s huge, an immense mass. The public is – listen, it’s the man you encounter one fine day, who says, “Monsieur Matisse, I can’t tell you how much I love your picture, the one you exhibited at the salon,” and this man is a clerk who could never spend a red cent on painting. The public is not the buyer; the public is the sensitive material on which you hope to leave an imprint.
PC: Through the picture, the audience returns to the source of emotion.
HM: Yes, and the artist is the actor, the fellow with the wheedling voice who won’t rest until he’s told you his life story.
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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Pearls from artists* # 187
“Big Wow,” 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.
As George Grosz said, at that last meeting he attended at the National Institute, “How did I come to be an artist? Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing.” It was a matter of taking a liking to things. Things that were in accordance with your taste. I think that was it. And we didn’t care how unhomogenous they might seem. Didn’t Aristotle say that it is the mark of a poet to see resemblances between apparently incongruous things? There was any amount of attraction about it.
Marianne Moore in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Second Series, edited by George Plimpton
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Pearls from artists* # 186
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 considered the painting of a picture the acme of human accomplishment; even today, the conviction still persists. At least I consider all artists as privileged and sacred beings, whatever they produce.
Self Portrait Man Ray, foreword by Merry A. Foresta
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Pearls from artists* # 185
Beginning of a 20″ x 26″ pastel painting
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
All of us fail to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews First Series
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Pearls from artists* # 184
“Couple,” 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.
Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for perfection. As George Grosz says, “In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.” The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronkowski says in the Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it’s not established once and for all; it’s evolving.
Marianne Moore in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Second Series
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Q: Is there a pastel painting that you are most proud of?
“She Embraced It and Grew Stronger,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38,” 2003
A: Without a doubt I am most proud of “She Embraced It and Grew Stronger.”
After Bryan was killed on 9/11, making art again seemed an impossibility. When he was alive I would spend weeks setting up and lighting the tableau I wanted to paint. Then Bryan would shoot two negatives using his Toyo-Omega 4 x 5 view camera. I would select one and order a 20″ x 24″ reference photo to be printed by a local photography lab.
“She Embraced It…” is the first large pastel painting that I created without using a photograph taken by Bryan. This painting proved that I had learned to use his 4 x 5 view camera to shoot the reference photographs that were (and still are) integral to my process. My life’s work could continue!
Certainly the title is autobiographical. ‘She’ in “She Embraced It and Grew Stronger” is me and ‘It’ means continuing on without Bryan and living life for both of us.
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Pearls from artists* # 183
West Village
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Part of what makes snowfall in a city magical is the way that muted sound and the sight of buildings and cars draped in whiteness go together. If we’re not too worried about missing appointments, we feel the excitement of moving into a new place where none of the old clutter and racket of our lives has arrived.
In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise by George Prochnik
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Pearls from artists* # 182
Hudson Yards, NYC
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Maybe you know exactly what you dream of being. Or maybe you’re paralyzed because you have no idea what your passion is. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring, and dreams are not real. Just… DO. You think, “I wish I could travel” – you sell your crappy car and buy a ticket and go to Bangkok right now. I’m serious. You say, “I want to be a writer” – guess what? A writer is someone who writes every day. Start writing. Or: You don’t have a job? Get one. ANY JOB. Don’t sit at home waiting for the magical dream opportunity. Who are you? Prince William? No. Get a job. Work. Do until you can do something else.
Commencement address to Dartmouth College, Shonda Rhimes in Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person
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