Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
Pearls from artists* # 392
A place to read, Alexandria, VA
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Dear Person,
Why read?
Because you only have one life but reading gives you many lives. Because you only have one personality but when you read a book you can be inside another mind and heart. Because experiencing elegance of language is one of the greatest pleasures of consciousness. Reading lets you be quiet in a chaotic world and commune with amazing people who may happen to be dead now, so not too easy to connect with otherwise. Reading startles you. Reading upsets you. Reading takes apart your world and expectations and rearranges them. Imagine the last few years without the books you have loved – it would be a much flatter, sadder experience of living. We read as a form of faith.
Naomi Wolf
A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick
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Pearls from artists* # 391
“Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20,” packed up for transport to the framer
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Charles Baudelaire once wrote that the frenzy of the artist
is the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the phantom escape before the synthesis has been extracted and pinned down; it is that terrible fear which takes possession of all great artists and gives them such a passionate desire to become masters of every means of expression so that the orders of the brain may never be perverted by the hesitations of the hand and that finally… ideal execution, may become as unconscious and spontaneous as is digestion for a healthy man after dinner.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 390
In the studio. Photo: Izzy Nova
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What made their work so unique and brilliant was that intangible element – self. Great painting, great art in general, is not about materials used or methods mastered or even talent possessed. It is a combination of all of these factors, and an individual driven by a force that seems outside them, toward expression of an idea they often do not understand.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 389
Henri Roche pastels: nine trays (four at the top, five on the bottom).
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Color vision must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for nearly all people as a property of their being human – determining that we all see blue. But the color lexicon, meaning not merely the particular words but also the specific chromatic space they are said to mark, clearly has been shaped by the particularities of culture. Since the spectrum of visible colors is a seamless continuum, where one color is thought to stop and another begun is arbitrary. The lexical discrimination of particular segments is conventional rather than natural. Physiology determines what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural.
David Scott Kastan in On Color
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Pearls from artists* # 388
Barbara’a 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 artist’s nature, that wild nature to which so many powers are entrusted, and which all too often abuses them, leading cold reason, the bourgeois public, and even some connoisseurs down a myriad barren paths, precisely where the capricious white-winged sprite discovers castles, epics, works of art! A nature sometimes mocking, sometimes kind, at once fertile and desolate!
Honore Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece
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Pearls from artists* # 387
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
You know, you don’t go into the studio and say, “Oh, here I am this marvelous heroine, this wonderful woman doing my marvelous painting so all these marvelous women artists can come after me and do their marvelous painting.” There you are alone in this huge space and you are not conscious of the fact that you have breasts and a vagina. You are inside yourself, looking at a damned piece of rag on the wall that you are supposed to make a world out of. That is all you are conscious of. I simply cannot believe that a man feels differently… Inside yourself, you are looking at this terrifying unknown and trying to feel, to pull everything you can out of all your experience, to make something. I think a woman or a man creating feels very much the same way. I bring my experience, which is different from a man’s, yes, and I put it where I can. But once that is done, I don’t know if it is a woman’s experience I’m looking at.
Grace Hartigan quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* # 386
Barbara’s studio with recent works 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.
[Art] is concerned with something that cannot be explained in words or literal description… Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition… Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content… The performance – how it is done – that is the content of art.
Joseph Albers quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* # 383
“Sentinels,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 38” x 58” image, 50” x 70” framed
* 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 mean to say that a work of art is a gift. The gifted artist contains the vitality of his gift within the work, and thereby makes it valuable to others. Furthermore, works we come to treasure are those which transmit that vitality and revive the soul. Such works circulate among us as reservoirs of available life, what Whitman calls “the tasteless water of souls.”
Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
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Pearls from artists* # 382
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 think a man [sic] spends his whole lifetime painting one picture or working on one piece of sculpture. The question of stopping is really a decision of moral considerations. To what extent are you intimidated by the actual act, so that you are beguiled by it? To what extent are you charmed by its inner life? And to what extent do you then really approach the intention or desire that is really outside it? The decision is always made when the purée has something in it that you wanted.
Barnett Newman quoted in The Unknown Masterpiece by Honore Balzac
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Pearls from artists* 381
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.
A work of art, if it is art, is not an end but a beginning. It is a challenge to the artist who produced it and to the artists around him to take the next step, to answer the questions raised by the work, to achieve what he or she has yet to accomplish. It also represents a challenge to the non-artist, who is offered a fresh vision.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
Comments are welcome!
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