Category Archives: Inspiration
Pearls from artists* # 52
Boat hull
* 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 modern way of seeing is to see in fragments. It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended. It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always, in the long run, untrue. To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience. But it also – so the modern way of seeing instructs us – denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real. Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake – our society, ourselves. What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.
Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, editors, Susan Sontag At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
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Pearls from artists* # 51
Road to Roden Crater in Arizona
* 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 demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadily along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity. As in any profession, facility develops. In most this is a decided advantage, and so it is with the actual facture of art; I notice with interest that my hand is more deft, lighter, as I grow more experienced. But I find that I have to resist the temptation to fall into the same kind of pleasurable relaxation I once enjoyed with clay. I have in some subtle sense to fight my hand if I am to grow along the reaches of my nerve.
And here I find myself faced with two fears. The first is simply that of the unknown – I cannot know where my nerve is going until I venture along it. The second is less sharp but more permeating: the logical knowledge that the nerve of any given individual is as limited as the individual. Under its own law, it may just naturally run out. If this happens, the artist does best, it seems to me, to fall silent. But by now the habit of work is so ingrained in me that I do not know if I could bear the silence.
Anne Truitt in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist
Pearls from artists* # 50
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The important thing is the intersection between intuition and discipline, because you have to be alert and at the same time invisible. The eye has to be alert and capture very quickly everything you have inside you – I don’t know how to explain it. What the eye sees is the synthesis of what you are or what you’ve learned to do, this is the language of photography…
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With
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Pearls from artists* # 49
Untitled, 24″ x 24″ chromogenic print, edition of 5
* 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 beauty of art is better, “higher,” according to Hegel, than the beauty of nature because it is made by human beings and is the work of the spirit. But the discerning of beauty in nature is also the result of traditions of consciousness, and of culture – in Hegel’s language, of spirit.
The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent. As Wilde pointed out, art does more than school us on how and what to appreciate in nature. (He was thinking of poetry and painting. Today the standards of beauty in nature are largely set by photography.) What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.
A happy by-product of this insight, if insight it is: beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous.
Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”
Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, editors, Susan Sontag At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
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Pearls from artists* # 46
Artist’s backyard
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Some things will naturally excite us more than others. This is where art begins, when we separate our inner-directed impulse from the outer-directed deluge of other people’s work and opinion. “The artists are the ones who bare themselves to this experience of essence… Their vocation is to communicate that experience to others. Not to communicate it is to surrender the vision to atrophy; the artist must paint, or write, or sculpt – else the vision withers away and he or she is less apt to have it again.”
The trick is to be able to learn to juggle at least two things at once. We need to keep the initial impulse in its entirety before us as we start engaging in the execution of the parts.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: Sixteen Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 45
iPad photo
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Why do you write plays? I am asked by the novelist. Why do you write novels? I am asked by the dramatist. Why do you make films? I am asked by the poet. Why do you draw? I am asked by the critic. Why do you write? I am asked by the draughtsman. Yes, why? I wonder. Doubtless so that my seed may be blown all over the place. I know little about this breath within me, but it is not gentle. It does not care for the sick. It is unmoved by fatigue. It takes advantage of my gifts. It wants to do its part. It is not inspiration, it’s expiration one should say. For this breath comes from a zone in man into which man cannot descend, even if Virgil were to lead him there, for Virgil himself did not descend into it.
Jean Cocteau in The Difficulty of Being
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Pearls from artists* # 44
Studio view
* 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 cannot even imagine the individual arts sufficiently distinct from one another. This admittedly exaggerated attitude might have its most acute origin in the fact that in my youth, I, quite inclined toward painting, had to decide in favor of another art so as not to be distracted. And thus I made this decision with a certain passionate exclusivity. Based on my experience, incidentally, every artist needs to consider for the sake of intensity his means of expression to be basically the only one possible while he is producing. For otherwise he could not easily suspect that this or that piece of world would not be expressible by his means at all and he would finally fall into that most interior gap between the individual arts, which is surely wide enough and could be genuinely bridged only by the vital tension of the great Renaissance masters. We are faced with the task of deciding purely, each one alone, on his one mode of expression, and for each creation that is meant to be achieved in this one area all support from the other arts is a weakening and a threat.
Ulrich Baer, editor, The Wisdom of Rilke
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Q: Please describe your artistic self in six words.
Alli’s backyard
A: Talking about myself I would say, “Seeker of color, light, and beauty;” on my creative journey, “Driven to communicate eloquently with less;” and concerning my artistic practice as a whole, “Excellence, authenticity, and integrity above everything.”
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Pearls from artists* # 42
Balinese dancer
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Things-as-they-are offer such an abundance of material that a photographer must guard against the temptation of trying to do everything. It is essential to cut from the raw material of life – to cut and cut, but to cut with discrimination. While working, a photographer must reach a precise awareness of what he is trying to do. Sometimes you have the feeling that you have already taken the strongest possible picture of a particular situation or scene; nevertheless, you find yourself compulsively shooting, because you cannot be sure in advance exactly how the situation, the scene is going to unfold. You must stay with the scene, just in case elements of the situation shoot off from the core again. At the same time, it’s essential to avoid shooting like a machine-gunner and burdening yourself with useless recordings which clutter your memory and spoil the exactness of the reportage as a whole.
Henri Cartier-Bresson in Images a la sauvette
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Q: Why do you need to use a photograph as a reference source to make a pastel painting?
One of Barbara’s reference photos
A: When I was about 4 or 5 years old I discovered that I had a natural ability to draw anything that I could see. It’s the way my brain is wired and it is a gift! One of my earliest memories as an artist is of copying the Sunday comics. Always it has been much more difficult to draw what I CANNOT see, i.e., to recall how things look solely from memory or to invent them outright.
The evolution of my pastel-on-sandpaper paintings has been the opposite of what one might expect. I started out making extremely photo-realistic portraits. I remember feeling highly unflattered when after months of hard work, someone would look at my completed painting and say, “It looks just like a photograph!” I know this was meant as a compliment, but to me it meant that I had failed as an artist. Art is so much more than copying physical appearances.
So I resolved to move away from photo-realism. It has been slow going and part of me still feels like a slacker if I don’t put in all the details. But after nearly three decades I have arrived at my present way of working, which although still highly representational, contains much that is made up, simplified, and/or stylized. As I have always done, I continue to work from life and from photographs, but at a certain point I put everything aside and work solely from memory.
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