Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
Pearls from artists* # 380
“John,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 22” x 28” (image), 1989.
* 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 freedom he enjoyed came at a cost. But those fears and irritations evaporated amid the support the artists gave one another immediately after the war. A community developed that sustained them and gave them courage. “You have to have confidence amounting to arrogance, because particularly at the beginning, you’re making something that nobody asked you to make,” Elaine [de Kooning] said. “And you have to have total confidence in yourself, and in the necessity of what you’re doing.” That was much easier done in a group of like-minded individuals.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 379
“Blind Faith,” 38″ x 58,” soft pastel on sandpaper
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Elaine’s and Bill’s [de Kooning] relationship involved a continual exchange of ideas that wasn’t restricted to conversations with friends. In the quiet of their studio when they were finally alone, they’d climb into bed and Elaine would read to Bill. Faulkner was a favorite. She also read Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War tales. And she would read Kierkegaard. That nineteenth-century father of Existentialism wrote with great passion about the essential solitude and uncertainty of the human struggle. They were words of consolation for Bill and Elaine who, though confident in their paths as artists, could not have been free of the nagging fear that they might spend their lives looking and never find what they sought in their work. Kierkegaard seemed to say that it didn’t matter, that it was striving that counted, and he described the need to reconcile oneself to the unknowable that was man’s fate. The artist, he said, had a crucial role to play in that regard. Like a religious figure who was an envoy from a realm most people could not access, the artist through his or her work revealed pure spirit so that men mired in the bitter reality of daily life might find the strength to continue.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 378
With “Poseur,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 70” x 50,” 2019
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
[John] Graham told Lee [Krasner] and Jackson [Pollock] they were at the most wonderful part of their artistic journey because they were unknown and therefore free, and that there was only one thing they had to dread: fame.
How many men of great talent on their way to remarkable achievement in the present day are ruthlessly destroyed by critics, dealers, and public while mediocre, insensitive hacks, who by intrigue and industrious commercial effort have gained recognition and success, will go down in history with their inane creations. Success, fame, and greatness coincide very seldom. The great are not recognized during their life-time… Poe, Van Gogh,Rembrandt, Cezanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and others could not make even a miserable living out of their art.
As Graham described it, true art could never be of the world because it was always steps, decades, light-years ahead of it. Artists, therefore, had no need to be part of the world, either. Their only duty was to persevere. Humanity, he said, depended on it.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 377
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.
Life for an artist, any artist, was difficult. There were few rewards other than the most important, which was satisfying one’s need to create. But in the art world of galleries, collections, and museums that the avant-garde artists in New York would inherit in the late 1940s, the difficulties experienced by the men who painted and sculpted would be nothing compared to those of the women. Society might mock the men’s work and disparage them for being “bums,” but at least they were awarded the dignity of ridicule. Women had to fight with every fiber of their being not to be completely ignored. In a treatise on men and women in America published at the start of the war, author Pearl S. Buck wrote,
The talented woman… must have, besides their talent, an unusual energy which drives them… to exercise their own powers. Like talented men, they are single-minded creatures, and they can’t sink into idleness nor fritter away life and time, nor endure discontent. They possess that rarest gift, integrity of purpose… Such women sacrifice, without knowing they do, what many other women hold dear – amusement, society, play of one kind or another – to choose solitude and profound thinking and feeling, and at last final expression.
“To what end?” another woman might ask. To the end, perhaps… of art – art which has lifted us out of mental and spiritual savagery.”
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 376
Chalcatzingo, Mexico
* 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 the cemetery all the vultures began to circle, and the sky filled with birds. It was then that I began my series on birds – many of my bird photos came from this moment. All this to say that in life everything is connected: your pain and your imagination, which perhaps can help you forget reality. It’s a way of showing how you connect what you live with what you dream, and what you dream with what you do, and this is what remains on paper.
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs
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Pearls from artists* # 373
Source material for “Danzante”
* 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 need to be inspired by my own work,” he said. “There’s no point in being inspired by Picasso. It’s OK, but it doesn’t help you. If you’re an artist you have to thrive on what you do and believe in what you do and be obsessed by it.”
Roger Ballens quoted in A Puzzle with No Solution: Roger Ballen’s Quest for Meaning Through Photography, by Jordan G. Teicher, New York Times, April 24, 2018.
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Pearls from artists* # 372
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.
Artists will, in their long education of sifting through what they like and respond to and what they don’t, find they “see” an artist’s work in the environment. They see a Corot or a Hopper. They know then that they have found a good subject because of the similarity of poetic attraction. They see with a set of limits or conventions that speak to them.
But as time goes on and you continue working, you find you do not consider those subjects any longer but they still register. They belong to someone else. You have found other affinities. Or perhaps more importantly you have found your own. You respond now to your own internal song. Art is about art as much as it is about nature. Everything we respond to has passed through our filter of artistic influences.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 371
“Poseur,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 58” x 38” at 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.
If you look at the work of an artist over a lifetime there is always transformation. Some hit a lively pace early on and then seem to lose it later. Others find that place progressively throughout their life; others still find it late. But regardless, they are all learning to isolate the poetic within them. That focus on the poetic in our own work increases our appreciation of the beauty around us, increases our growth, and increases our divine connection.
One thing you see in many artists’ work is that as they continue over the decades to translate their experience of the poetic into form, they learn to communicate better. They strip away all the extraneous stuff and artistic baggage they had. They say more with less.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 370
Barbara at work on “The Orator.” Photo: Maria 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.
Nothing determines your creative life more than doing it. This is so obvious and fundamental, yet how much energy is wasted on speculation, worry, and doubt without the relief of action. “Success is 90 percent just showing up.” I can’t tell you the number of problems that are solved with this one simple principle, because when you start, it leads to something, anything. And when you have something tangible in front of you, then you can react to it and amend it. And that will lead to something else. In the book, In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr., which looked at companies in America that excelled at what they did, one of the guiding principles was, “Do it, mend it, fix it.”
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 369
Central Park, 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.
Salieri wrote a memoir of his own, which his friend Ignacio von Mosel used as the basis for a biography, published in 1827. Salieri’s original document disappeared, but Mosel quoted parts of it. One anecdote is particularly winning. Salieri is recounting the premier, in 1770, of his second opera, “Le Donne Letterate” (“The Learned Woman”). The applause is vigorous, prompting the young composer to follow the audience out into the street, in the hope of soaking up more praise. He overheard a group of operagoers:
“The opera is not bad,” said one. “It pleased me right well,” said a second (that man I could have kissed). “For a pair of beginners, it is no small thing,” said the third. “For my part,” said the fourth, “I found it very tedious.” At these words I struck off into another street for fear of hearing something still worse.
Any creative person who has made the mistake of surreptiously canvassing public opinion will identify with Salieri’s fatal curiosity.
Alex Ross in Salieri’s Revenge in The New Yorker, June 3, 2019
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