Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
Pearls from artists* # 599
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Leonora [Carrington] certainly became knowledgeable about Mexican muralism and in the early 1960s she would paint her own mural, el mundo mágico de Los mayas, but she was clear that this didn’t involve associating herself with the Mexican school [of muralists]. ‘I was not interested in a social message in painting and my mural was totally foreign to that discourse,’ she explained. Explanations were not something she gave often; she was always very clear that for her, elucidation was neither necessary nor possible, because she believed that art spoke to people in the deepest part of their psyche. She warned me not to try to rationalize or intellectualize it. The way to understand paintings, she said, was to tune in to one’s own feelings about a work: ‘You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make into a kind of mini-logic – you’ll never understand by that road.’
Joanna Moorhead in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
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Pearls from artists* # 598
*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 art to appear, we have to disappear. This may sound strange, but in fact it is a common appearance. The elementary case, for most people, is when our eye or ear is “caught” by something: a tree, a rock, a cloud, a beautiful person, a baby’s gurgling, spatters of sunlight reflected off some wet mud in the forest, the sound of a guitar wafting unexpectedly out of a window. Mind and sense are arrested for a moment, fully in the experience. Nothing else exists. When we “disappear” in this way, everything around us becomes a surprise, new and fresh. Self and environment unite. Attention and intention fuse. We see things just as we and they are, yet we are able to guide and direct them to be one just the way we want them. This lively and vigorous state of mind is the most favorable to the germination of original work of any kind. It has its roots in child’s play, and its ultimate flowering in full-blown artistic creativity.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 597
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.
From earliest childhood, the boys had been treated differently from their sister. They were allowed more freedom, encouraged to play outdoors and to engage in rough and tumble, and their lives were expanded early on when, at the age of seven, each was sent to St. Mary’s, the prep school of Stonyhurst College. It seemed as if the boys were being readied for adventure and excitement, but while their horizons were opening up, Leonora [Carrington] felt hers were being closed down – or more specifically, never explored. Her role, which was clear even when she was in the nursery, was to keep safe: not to rock any boats, not to take any chances. What they sought to teach her was that she should sit a certain way and behave a certain way: she should be supportive, helpful, polite. She should listen, especially to men, she should have traditional skills, such as playing music and speaking French. Drawing and painting, for which she showed altitude from an early age, were fine within reason. What harm could there be in Prim [Lenora] creating pictures? Especially if those pictures were of flowers and trees, family members and characters from fairy stories.
But art was Leonora’s secret weapon – and she hid it in plain sight, because her parents did not have the faintest idea where her talents might lead. Art, for them, was unthreatening and pretty. They had no idea that this skill their daughter was developing would be one the key to another life entirely; still less that art could never be a validation of the status quo, but meant a radical reappraisal of everything in the artists sight.
So what Leonora practiced in the nursery at Crookhey was the subversive silence of smoldering rebellion. Spared by the inherent unfairness that gave Pat, Gerard, and Arthur so much freedom; stoked by the growing realization that she had a talent that would lead, eventually, to Liberty. “I always painted, and I always knew it was what I would do,” she said many years later. As the Jesuits who educated her brothers at Stonyhurst might have said (but didn’t): show me a girl aged seven, and I will show you the woman.
Joanna Moorhead in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
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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* # 595
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.
One of the great paradoxes of the writing life is that our words – chosen carefully, so thoughtfully, with deep focus and concentration – those words once on the page go dead on us. Language is ours only when we are forming sentences, moving elements around, grappling with punctuation, speaking words aloud, feeling them on our lips. While we are shaping a scene into something we can hear and touch and see, that scene lives and breathes. We are inside language like painters, we are working in our medium: the tempera, the thin line, the wet oil on canvas, still in process, still alive.
But once we commit – once those words dry like paint, are affixed to the page – it becomes nearly impossible to see them. This? We think to ourselves. Our most loathsome critic emerges with a swirl of her cape. Really? What the hell is this? The sentences appear to have been written in another language – a dark dream language, tucked into some musty, inaccessible corner of our psyche. Attempting to discern its meaning is a bit like looking at our own face in the mirror. It is at once so familiar as to be invisible, and so intimate that we turn away, baffled, ashamed.
Can we ever see ourselves, really? Can we read ourselves?
It is a powerful conundrum because without the ability to see our writing afresh we cannot do the necessary work. How do we know whether a problem lies with the work, or with our inability to enter it? We need clarity, but not coldness. Openness, but not attachment. We want optimism, but that optimism must not go hand in hand with discernment. We’re not looking for a cheerleader, nor a fault-finding judge. We want to read ourselves with equanimity.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life
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Pearls from artists* # 594
*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 creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as opposed to ideal) gods of our society – the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitive power. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshipped by multitudes of people.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 593
Barbara’s Studio with work in progress
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Falling in love with beauty or with someone else’s artwork that touches us is easy. We can experience the rapture of it and go home. But falling in love with our instrument or with our work is more like falling in love with a person, in that we experience the rapture and delight of the discovery, but then we are saddled with the effort of fulfillment, with love’s labors and the hard lessons in which illusions are stripped away, in which we confront difficult pieces of self-knowledge, in which we have to stretch our physical, emotional, intellectual stamina to its limits, in which our patience and our ability to persevere and transcend ourselves are tested.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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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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