Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
Pearls from artists* # 291
“The Sovereign,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″ image, 70″ x 50″ 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.
Intuitively, we must be truthful to our vision, our conception. Intellectually, we must concentrate on importance. In other words, let us be no all-eater, no all-reader, no all-believer, let us be selective instead of being curious.
… Quality in art is more permanent than any propaganda associated with it.
Joseph Albers in Truthfulness in Art in Joseph Albers in Mexico, edited by Lauren Hinkson
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Pearls from artists* # 290
“Dichotomy,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Rational functionalism is technique,
Irrational functionalism is art.
Art is creation
It can be based on but is independent of knowledge.
We can study art through nature,
but art is more than nature.
Art is spirit,
and has a life of its own.
Art in its nature is anti-historical
because creative work is looking forward.
It can be connected with tradition
but grows, consciously or unconsciously, out of an artist’s mentality.
Art is neither imitation nor repetition
but art is revelation.
Joseph Albers in Truthfulness in Art in Joseph Albers in Mexico, edited by Lauren Hinkson
Comments are welcome!
Q: Please speak about how the three pastel paintings series that you have created interrelate.
“The Orator,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
A: The Black Paintings series of pastel-on-sandpaper paintings grew directly from an earlier series, Domestic Threats. While both use cultural objects as surrogates for human beings acting in mysterious, highly-charged narratives, in the Black Paintings I replaced all background details of my actual setup (furniture, rugs, etc.) with lush black pastel. In this work the ‘actors’ are front and center.
While traveling in Bolivia last spring, I visited a mask exhibition at the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz. The masks were presented against black walls, were spot-lit, and looked eerily like 3D versions of my Black Paintings. I immediately knew I had stumbled upon a gift. So far I have completed three pastel paintings in the Bolivianos series. Two more are in progress now.
All of my pastel paintings are an example of a style called “contemporary conceptual realism” in which things are not quite as innocent as they seem. Each painting is a Trojan horse. There is plenty of backstory to my images, although I usually prefer not to over-explain them. Much is to be said for mystery in art.
The world I depict is that of the imagination and this realm owes little debt to the natural world. Recently, at an art talk I was reminded how fascinating it is to learn how others respond to my work. As New York art critic Gerrit Henry once remarked, “What we bring to a Rachko… we get back, bountifully.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 289
“Danzante,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38” x 58”, 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.
I do not think it the business of a poet to become a guru. It is his business to write poetry, and to do that he must remain open and vulnerable. We grow through relationships of every kind, but most of all through a relationship that takes the whole person. And it would be pompous and artificial to make an arbitrary decision to shut the door.
The problem is to keep a balance, not to fall to pieces. In keeping her balance in her last years Louise Bogan stopped writing poems, or nearly. It was partly, I feel sure, that the detachment demanded of the critic (and especially his absorption in analyzing the work of others) is diametrically opposed to the kind of detachment demanded of the poet in relationship to his own work. We are permitted to become detached only after the shock of an experience has been taken in, allowed to “happen” in the deepest sense. Detachment comes with examining the experience by means of writing the poem.
May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman
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Pearls from artists* # 288
Los Cabos, 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.
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 287
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.
“To go back and introduce into all the schools art, to cut down on sports but bring arts, philosophy back into all educational systems,” he said. “And that’s what’s being cut everywhere. And I think that’s one of the sad and tragic parts of where we are. Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.”
Jonas Mekas quoted in Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person, by John Leland, The New York Times, Dec. 29, 2017.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 286
Museo de Antropología de Xalapa
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
All real art is or was modern in its time,
daring and new,
demonstrating a constant change in seeing and feeling.
If revival had been a perpetual virtue,
we would still live in caves and earth pits.
In art, tradition is to create,
not to revive.
Joseph Albers quoted in Ruins in Reverse by Lauren Hinkson in Joseph Albers in Mexico
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Pearls from artists* # 285
“The Orator,” 38″ x 58,” boxed to go 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.
So much of the writing life is mundane. Buying printer ink and paper, doing dishes, arranging the pens in the cup, smoke breaks on the phone, taking baths or going for walks or sitting blankly on the couch wondering if the day will end before one makes a discovery or a decision. These habits of day-to-day tedium are what can’t be seen on the surface of a writer’s face when we meet her at a book signing – the time and effort spent living in her own head. Writing is a lonesome art.
Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review, preface by Ottessa Moshfegh
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Pearls from artists* # 284
“The Magical Other,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 48″ x 38″
*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 can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
So… to work. It is not a non sequitur. I shall never be one of those directly active (except as a teacher, occasionally), but now and then I am made aware that my work, odd though it seems, does help people. But it is only in these last years at Nelson that I have known that for sure.
May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 283
Wintry day in DC
*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 live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems. It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears. I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the “undone” and the “unsent.” I often feel exhausted, but it is not my work that tires (work is a rest); it is the effort of pushing away the lives and needs of others before I can come to work with any freshness and zest.
May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman
Comments are welcome!
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