Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
Pearls from artists* # 272
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.
One important distinction that can be made between physicists and novelists, and between the scientific and artistic communities in general, is what I shall call “naming.” Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things.
To name a thing, one needs to have gathered it, distilled and purified it, attempted to identify it with clarity and precision. One puts a box around the thing and says what’s in the box is the thing and what’s not is not…
… The objects and concepts of the novelist cannot be named. The novelist might use the words love and fear, but these names do not summarize or convey much to the reader. For one thing, there are a thousand different kinds of love…
… Every electron is identical, but every love is different.
The novelist doesn’t want to eliminate these differences, doesn’t want to clarify and distill the meaning of love so that there is only a single meaning… because no such distillation exists. And any attempt at such a distillation would undermine the authenticity of readers’ reactions, destroying the delicate, participatory creative experience of a good reader reading a good book. In sense, a novel is not complete until it is read. And each reader completes the novel in a different way.
Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
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Pearls from artists* # 271
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 following quote is so true for artists also!
Without a powerful emotional commitment, scientists could not summon up the enormous energy needed for pursuing an idea for years, working day and night in the lab or at their desks doing calculations, often sacrificing the rest of their lives. It is little wonder that such a personal commitment sometimes causes the scientist to defend his or her beliefs regardless of facts.
Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
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Pearls from artists* # 270
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.
As Charlie Parker quipped, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” And it won’t register in your bearing: this is the earned credit for trying to walk the daily tightrope and tell your story when you get to the other side.
Joel Dinerstein in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
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Pearls from artists* # 269
“White Star,” 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.
In an artistic sense, cool came to refer to someone with a signature artistic style so integral as to exude an authentic mode-of-being in the world: Miles, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood, Greco, Elvis, Lady Day, Sinatra. Such a person created something from nothing and gave the world some new artistic or psychological “equipment for living,” to use a phrase of Kenneth Burke’s. A signature style is yours and can only be carried by you: it cannot be abstracted except through dilution and commodification since it reflects an individual’s complex personal experience.
Joel Dinerstein in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
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Pearls from artists* # 268
The Lightning Field, Quemado, NM
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Visit 1: October 18 and 19, 2003, continued
The long drive through the New Mexico landscape from Albuquerque to Quemado to The Lightning Field is a gradual slide towards emptiness, a prelude. Or a subtle preparation for the eyes and mind. The practicalities of the cabin provide simple accommodations that address basic needs to maximize focus and minimize distraction.
At The Lightning Field, my experience of space began with the rational structure of the grid, which was eventually exposed by less rational behavior.
The artwork locates the physical environment in space, and my perception of the work began with the regularity of the grid. The repeated unit of the pole was not significant, only its holistic engagement between human scale and the landscape of the sky. Then the effects of light, the anticipation of cycles of change through the course of the day and night, the possibility of the unpredictable.
Laura Raicovich in At The Lightning Field
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Pearls from artists* # 267
The Lightning Field, Quemado, NM
* 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 1968, art critic David Bourdon wrote (before The Lightning Field was built): “De Maria is after a deeper commitment on the part of the spectator, who is asked to become an agent or catalyst in the fulfillment of the work… the burden of response is placed not on the sculpture but on the spectator.
Laura Raicovich in At The Lightning Field
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Pearls from artists* # 266
Washington, 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.
… it is easy to describe the natural objects that we can hold in our hands, or move into view, as we would describe works of art: and this conditions the kind of pleasure we take in them. They are objets trouves, jewels, treasures, whose perfection seems to radiate from themselves, as from an inner light. Landscapes by contrast are very far from works of art – they owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.
Roger Scruton in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
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Pearls from artists* # 265
“Colloquium,” 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.
I remember hearing Adolph Gottlieb on a panel once at NYU, and Adolph said, in effect – I’m not quoting him directly – “I don’t paint for the masses. I paint for the elite. The masses are not interested in what I do. They won’t understand this kind of painting that I do, and it won’t come through to them.”
I understood perfectly what he meant, and I was totally sympathetic. But the audience, which was not quite an audience of proletariat workers, but an audience of school of education, art teachers, or art teachers to be, were going out of their heads with rage just at the mention of the elite.
I think there is an elite, and there always was an elite for painting or good music or for good literature. For a long time there has been, and I don’t see anything wrong with it. What it means to a lot of people, the elite is the wealthy or something like that. Adolph, I don’t think, was referring to an elite of the wealthy, where the people run the government or something like that, but to those people who are concerned and interested in the most sophisticated, meaningful painting there is.
The Art Life: On Creativity and Career by Stuart Horodner
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Pearls from artists* # 264
Barbara at work, Photo: Marianne Barcellona
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Science brims with colorful personalities, but the most important thing about a scientific result is not the scientist who found it, but the result itself. Because that result is universal. In a sense, that result already exists. It is only found by the scientist. For me, this impersonal, disembodied character of science is both its great strength and its great weakness.
I couldn’t help comparing the situation to my other passion, the arts. In the arts, the individual is the essence. Individual expression is everything. You can separate Einstein from the equations of relativity, but you cannot separate Beethoven from the Moonlight Sonata. No one will ever write The Tempest except Shakespeare or The Trial except Kafka.
Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
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Pearls from artists* # 263
“Alone Together,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Making art and viewing art are different at their core. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. That belief, if widely embraced, would make this book unnecessary, false, or both. Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare. Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes). Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to making a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.
David Bayles and Ted Orlando in Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING
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