Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
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* # 588
Screen shot from “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” Photo: Jennifer Cox
*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 structure of the hand is not… “just anything;” the fingers have certain characteristic relationships, certain ranges of relative movement, certain kinds of crossing, torquing, jumping, sliding, pressing, releasing movements that guide the music to come out a certain way. Graceful work uses those patterns and instinctively moves through them and out as we find ever-fresh combinations. The shape and size of the human hand brings powerful but subtle laws into every kind of art, craftsmanship, mechanical work, and into our ideas and feelings as well. There is a continuous dialogue between hand and instrument, hand and culture. Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own. Often enigmas that battle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 587
With friends of fifty years!
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
My general preparations include everything I do to be healthy and ready for surprises, with a full palette of resources available. I need energy to acquire skill, energy to practice, energy to keep going through the inevitable setbacks, energy to keep going when things look good and I am tempted to sit back and relax. I need physical energy, intellectual energy, libidinal energy, spiritual energy. The means to tapping these energies are well known: exercise the body, eat well, sleep well, keep track of dreams, meditate, enjoy the pleasures of life, read and experience widely. When blocked, tap into the block-busters: humor, friends, and nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 586
Starting a new one!
*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 page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego – and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude. No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. Isn’t this true for most of us? A surgeon about to perform a difficult operation is at the bottom of the mountain. A lawyer delivering a closing argument. An actor waiting in the wings. A teacher on the first day of school. Sometimes we may think that we’re in charge, or that we have things figured out. Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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Pearls from artists* # 585
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Without play, learning and evolution are impossible. Play is the taproot from which original art springs; it is the raw stuff that the artist channels and organizes with all his learning and technique. Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances. Creative work is play; it is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Artists play with color and space. Musicians play with sound and silence. Eros plays with lovers. Gods play with the universe. Children play with everything they can get their hands on.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 584
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.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
Carl Jung quoted by Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 583
In the Studio Photo: Susan Erlichman
*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’s return to Michelangelo’s idea of removing apparent surfaces to reveal or liberate the statue that has been buried in the stone since the beginning of time. Michelangelo claimed that he was guided by a faculty he called intelleto. Intelleto is intelligence, not of the merely rational kind, but visionary intelligence, a deep seeing of the underlying pattern beneath appearances. Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surfaces from the Self, revealing his original nature.
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* # 581
With recent “Bolivianos”
*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 essence of style is this: We have something in us, about us; it can be called many things, but for now let’s call it our original nature. We are born with our original nature, but on top of that, as we grow up, we accommodate to the patterns and habits of our culture, family, physical environment, and the daily business of the life we have taken on. What we are taught solidifies as “reality.” Our persona, the mask we show the world, develops out of our experience and training, step by step from infancy to adulthood. We construct our world through the actions of perception, learning, and expectation. We construct our “self” through the same actions of perception, learning, and expectation. World and self interlock and match each other, step by step and shape by shape. If the two constructions, self and world, mesh, we grow from child to adult becoming “normally adjusted individuals.” If they do not mesh so well, we may experience feelings of inner division, loneliness, or alienation.
If we should happen to become artists, our work takes on, to a certain extent, the style of the time: the clothing in which we are dressed by our generation, our country and language, our surroundings, the people who have influenced us.
But somehow, even when we are grown up and “adjusted,” everything we do and are – our handwriting, the vibrato of our voice, the way we handle the bow or breathe into the instrument, our way of using language, the look in our eyes, the pattern of whirling fingerprints on our hand – all these things are symptomatic of our original nature. They all show the imprint of our own deeper style or character.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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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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