Category Archives: Pearls from Artists
Pearls from artists* # 241
“The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ 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.
A few years ago I heard a lecture about the Whitney family, especially about Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whose patronage established the museum of that name in New York City. The talk was given by Mrs. Whitney’s granddaughter, and she used a fine phrase when speaking of her family – of their sense of “inherited responsibility” – to do, of course, with received wealth and a sense of using it for public good. Ah! Quickly I slipped this phrase from the air and put it into my own pocket!
For it is precisely how I feel, who has inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground – and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question – never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me – to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* # 240
Great Salt Lake, Utah
* 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 creative work – creative work of all kinds – those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook – a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary. It has a hunger for eternity.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* #239
At work on “False Friends”; photo by Diana Feit
* 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 a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart – to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* # 238
Self-portrait with “Blue Misterioso”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Form is certainty. All nature knows this, and we have no greater advisor. Clouds have forms, porous and shape-shifting, bumptious, fleecy. They are what clouds need to be, to be clouds. See a flock of them come, on the sled of the wind, all kneeling above the blue sea. And in the blue water, see the dolphin built to leap, the sea mouse skittering; see the ropy kelp with its air-filled bladders tugging it upward; see the albatross floating day after day on its three-jointed wings. Each form sets a tone, enables a destiny, strikes a note in the universe unlike any other. How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* # 237
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.
You must not ever stop being whimsical.
And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, better than anger, better than bitterness, and because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and living, a handsome life.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 236
“Some Things We Regret,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ 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.
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives, it does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healng and not all scars are ugly.
Olivia Laing in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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Pearls from artists* # 235
“Effigy,” 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.
People make things – make art or things that are akin to art – as a way of expressing their need for contact, or their fear of it; people make objects as a way of coming to terms with shame, with grief. People make objects to strip themselves down, to survey their scars, and people make objects to resist oppression, to create a space in which they can move freely. Art doesn’t have to have a reparative function, any more than it has a duty to be beautiful or moral.
Olivia Laing in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 234
“The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ 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.
Be a good steward to your gifts. This is the first sentence on a list I keep tacked to the bulletin board in my study, an impeccable set of instructions left by poet Jane Kenyon.
Protect your time.
Feed your inner life.
Avoid too much noise.
Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.
Be by yourself as often as you can.
Walk.
Take the phone off the hook
Work regular hours.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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Pearls from artists* # 233
“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.
These words are true for most artists, not only writers.
There is the gift, of course, which is inseparable from – though not the same as – a need, a hunger for expression. It is possible to have the gift without the need. It is possible to have the need without the gift. The former can lead to a happy and contented life. I have seen promising young writers discard their gift, shrugging it off like a wrap on a warm summer evening. They don’t care. They don’t want or need it. The other, however, is a painful situation: the hunger for self-expression without the gift – that ineffable thing you can’t teach, or buy, or will into being. This story often ends in resentment and unfulfillment. Then there is endurability – Ted Solotaroff’s word – the ability to withstand the years in the cold, the solitary life, the affronts and indignities, the painful rejections that never end. The gift and the hunger are nothing without that endurability. But up there with the gift, the hunger, and endurance is another trait, without which the writer’s life can’t possibly work.
The writing life is full of risk. There is the creative risk – the willingness to fall flat on our face again and again – but there is also practical risk. As in, it may not work out. We don’t get brownie points for trying really hard. When we set our hopes on this life, we are staking our future on the contents of our own minds. On our ability to create and continue to create. We have nothing but this. No 401(k), no pension plan, often no IRA, no plans – God knows – for retirement. We have to accept living with profound uncertainty.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 232
Studio entrance
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Think of this distance we travel between home and work, between family and art, between our everyday responsibilities and the life of the imagination as our own version of a rush-hour commute. We’re not standing on a platform, boarding a train, shouldering our way through crowds on our way from home to office – a ritual that creates its own buffer zone between the two traversed worlds – but we are still making a journey. It’s a solitary trek, and to a casual observer it might not seem like we’re going anywhere at all. We might, for instance, be sitting in the same exact spot. We might be wearing the same clothes we slept in, or maybe we’ve actually showered and put on a semblance of normal attire. But no matter. We are commuting inward. And on Monday mornings – or after a long holiday, a summer vacation, any time we have been away from the page – we have to be even more vigilant about that commute. We are traveling to that place inside ourselves – so small as to be invisible – where we are free to roam and play. So let the electric company wait. Let the mail pile up. Turn off the phone’s ringer. The voices around us grow quiet and still. We travel as surely as we’re in our cars, listening to NPR, our mug of coffee in its trusty cup holder. We know that once we enter the place from which we write, it will expand to make room for us. It will be wider than the world.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
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