Category Archives: Quotes
Pearls from artists* # 374
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.
Finally, [John] Graham said, of all the arts, painting was the most difficult because one false move on a canvas could mean the difference between a great painting and a failure. A writer could always resurrect a word, but a line or a shape was so ephemeral that, once changed, it was almost always lost for good. “To create life one has to love. To create a great work of art one has to love truth with the passion of a maniac. If society does not perceive this love, perhaps humanity will.” …The artists… came away… feeling as though they were not aberrations but part of a long tradition of individuals who had ignored fashion to create culture.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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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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Pearls from artists* # 368
Leonora Carrington at Di Donna Galleries, 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.
Whether we look to the contradictory functions that people are asked to fulfill today – devoted parent and loyal employee, faithful spouse and emancipated libertine, mature adult and eternal child – or to the ways in which identities are disbursed across divergent political forums, information systems, and communication networks, the same observation holds: we are infinitely divided. What is called an individual today is an abstract assemblage of fragments. Phone calls, emails, voice mails, blogs, videos and photos, surveillance tapes, banking records: the body is dwarfed by the virtual tendrils that shoot out if it through time and space, any of which is likely to claim to be the real “you” as you are. Only the imaginal mind can lead us out of the maze, with art providing the symbols that mark the way to the elusive essence that truly defines us.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice:A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 366
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.
For some artists the studio becomes like a temple, a place that becomes invested with a sacred energy. I was looking at a book recently called Artist at Work. It featured the studios of several well-known American artists. In almost every case the space reminded me of a chapel in a cathedral. The physical, emotional, and even spiritual elevation the space created contributed to the work.
This is the home turf of your creative space. A space that stays undisturbed from the rest of daily forces. It stays open for your arrival. When you walk in you acquire a heightened readiness to begin. Your dining room table that must be cleared off for the evening meal will require more energy from you each time you begin. but a studio collects energy and focuses it, ready for your return. That space may be your garden, the view behind the house, or a desk in a bedroom that is reserved for your creative work. But it will help to secure it. It is your temple, the place where you focus your energies to express yourself. Your creative home base.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 365
Ahmedabad, India
* 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 important thing is the intersection between intuition and discipline, because you have to be alert and at the same time invisible. The eye has to be alert and capture very quickly everything you have inside you – I don’t know how to explain it. What the eye sees is the synthesis of what you are or what you’ve learned to do, this is the language of photography…
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs
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Pearls from artists* # 364
“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.
If we are left unmoved by a painting of the Virgin, it is likely because the artist was unmoved in the painting of her. The subject matter is mostly irrelevant; it is important only as a vehicle for the artist’s attention. Authenticity comes from how deeply the artist felt. And this is the key to how much silence, how much consciousness or attention, the art contains.
… subject matter, if the artist is even using it, is just an armature for the artist to engage his intensity of feeling. It is the quality of your attention that influences how you see and how deeply you feel. Different artists have affinities for different subject matter as a way into expressing themselves deeply. And that depth is the quality, we, the viewers, respond to. It is what we continue to respond to over the centuries in great works of art. The fact that things last, that we continue to admire them, is in the end a good indicator of their quality, of their silence. Art museums therefore, have little nodes of silence nestling in their galleries. They are filled with, to use André Malraux’s expression, “the voices of silence.”
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 363
Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Beauty seems to need quiet and take patience, both to create it and to experience it.
If our minds are filled with a long and urgent “to do” list, we are not likely to slow down enough to appreciate anything but the next line we can draw through our never-ending list. Yet every now and again something stops us. It arrests our constant external activity and search. We can be stopped by the way the light filters through the trees in our backyard or hits a bowl of fruit on our kitchen table. And we are silenced, even if momentarily. We can be stopped by cave paintings as easily as by a thirteenth-century tapestry or a fifteenth-century Italian painting. We may be impressed by the craft of the artist, but almost always what moves us most deeply is the beauty that is expressed by the craft.
In the face of beauty, we are silenced because beauty expresses silence. In lavishing attention on the object of the artwork, the consciousness of the artist can touch something divine, some transcendental quality, and that transcendent element now resides in the artwork. How do we know it? We feel it. We experience it. Our heart responds to that sublime quality the artist infused into the work.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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