Category Archives: Quotes
Pearls from artists* # 717
In the 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
Go slowly. Success is a kind of energy field. You vibrate in it like a charged particle. There are new demands on your tine and talents, new interview requests and business questions, new possibilities and opportunities. In this context, when you have a free half-hour you may continue spinning like a top. Walk, breathe, stretch, meditate. Do the mundane: scrape a carrot, sweep the patio. Calm down.
Manage your money. You may or may not have paydays like this again. Study a book on money management. Learn your options. Think before you have a full-time personal trainer or buy Adar that corners too tightly at 100 miles an hour. Think before you find yourself in the position of needing to earn half a million a year in order to cover expenses and feed your vast retinue.
Protect your privacy. Begin to calculate how public and accessible you want to be. Learn how not to give yourself away. Be able to say “Thank you” and “I don’t have an answer for that question.” Have an interview persona and a public persona. At the same time be able to access your humanity.
Manage your anxiety. New stresses exist in your life. More is expected of you. The ante on each project rises. Success is not a magic pill that allays anxieties.
Expect setbacks. The next book you write after your bestseller may disappoint you, your publisher, or your readers. The movie you directed after your blockbuster May bomb. But even if your stock is lowered in the eyes of the world, it need not sink in your own eyes. Virtually no artist experiences one success after another. Determine to come back. If doors have closed to you, consult your business adviser. Plan and analyze ways to reopen them. Demonstrate your courage all over again.
Remain human. Guard your privacy and your person; decline to become a stereotype or a frozen icon. Be more than the bad-boy rock singer, the sex goddess, the reclusive dancer, the brilliant violin virtuoso. Remember that you have a heart and mind as well as a reputation.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: An Expanded Workbook Edition of Staying Sane in the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 716
*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 are in the early stages of what I hope will be a revolution surrounding the way we view creative labor. I optimistically dream of a new model, crafted by the next generation of artists. Hopefully, they will not have to spend too many years chasing the old, late-stage capitalist one, as we did. We must cultivate a sense of our own value. As audiences, we willingly spend money for the experiences of books, plays, and other performances. It is not unusual to drop forty dollars on a mediocre movie and bad popcorn, or hundreds for a concert. Yet, we have tolerated a system where artists are not paid for putting their time, money, and very souls into the creation of inspiring, thought-provoking works. It is time to collectively channel creativity towards new paradigms, to provide us with a living wage, ensure that art history reflects all of us, and change the very status of art in our culture. Armed with the truth, technology, and ingenuity, we can forge a powerful future.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 715
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Whenever we must solve a big problem, such as the art/money challenge, it is worthwhile to look inward, to see where we may be complicit in perpetuating the problem. While artists are not always valued in our society, we also get what we settle for. Although we must eat and pay rent or mortgages like everyone else, non-artists often try to persuade us that we do not deserve to earn a living wage, because we enjoy our job. In the United States, we are often asked to work for free in a way that other professionals are not.
Consider trying to get an accountant to work ‘for the exposure.’ In many cases, artists go to college, even graduate school, to learn our profession. Many of us are still paying off student loans. We put in thousands of hours to develop our skills. We may win awards or grants that distinguish us from other artists. It is up to us to put a stop to the devaluation of our profession. Artists who agree to work for free, or for a pittance, are essentially strikebreakers on a picket line. As a group, we should be fighting in solidarity to raise standards of living and respect for our collective profession by refusing to work for less. When we agree to bad conditions, we devalue ourselves, and enable a dysfunctional system that perpetuates the exploitation of artists.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 714
*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 moment comes when we realize that we have fallen in love with our instrument, our sculptor’s tools, our dance floor, our computer. We are in love with music, art, literature, cooking, physics. We feel love of beauty, love of the craft well done, love of the material, of the instruments. We feel the sensuality of playing, and of listening, reading, seeing, learning. The desire to learn and to play, if we have it at all, the motive power of creation, is part of our innate makeup, that craving to reach beyond ourselves.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 713
Dropping off “Magisterial” 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
One of the great traps at times of blockage is that we may accuse ourselves of a deficit of concentration and focus, a deficit of discipline. We then take a paternal or militaristic attitude toward ourselves. We will force ourselves to work, we will go on a schedule, we will take vows. The most dangerous trap is to get into a contest of strength between “will power” and “won’t power.” Discipline is crucial, but we do not attain it by stiffening up. We attain it by sitting still and penetrating the emptiness within, making of that emptiness a friend rather than an adversary or bogeyman.
When you are stuck, meditate, free associate, do automatic writing, talk to yourself and answer yourself. Play with the blocks. Stay in the temenos of the workplace. Relax, surrender to the bafflement; don’t leave the temenos, and the solution will come. Persevere gently. Use intelleto, the visionary faculty. Stay close to the zero mark; indulge neither in great highs or great lows.
The depths are obscured in us when we try to force feelings; we clarify them by giving them adequate time and space and letting them come. What we experienced yesterday as the pride of creativity or the self-deprecating feeling of incapacity we see today as the signal to surrender.
Like the rules of the universe, the whole matter of personal creativity is baffling and paradoxical. To try to control yourself, to try to create, to try to break free of the knots you yourself have tied is to set yourself up at a distance from that which you already are. It is like looking around this way and that for your own head.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 712
Finished: “Magisterial,” 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
To get to the idea of our relation to the creative impulses that flow through us, we can look at the way we respond to our own finished work. I have two responses. First, I’m done with the image in terms of my attachment to it. Whether the painting has succeeded or failed, I’m pretty much done with it.
But paradoxically, I also have an almost objective fascination with the marks and traces of my work when it is successful. I look at it and am fascinated by it, because I don’t know how I did it. It’s as if I’m looking at someone else’s work. I am more astonished by the result than anyone else might be. I know that I have been in the service of spirit, a channel for the divine.
Ian Robert’s in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 711
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 people considered ‘most accomplished’ in our culture pass through a standardized education conveyor belt to be indoctrinated into a cutthroat hamster wheel success ladder. Yet the production and consumption of those goods are destroying the planet that sustains our very lives. Those who question the absurdity of these choices are considered deviant. Try to carve a different path for yourself that makes sense to you, and every societal force conspires to push you back into that absurd groove that virtually everyone else swerved into long ago.
Artists also deal with vocation specific stress. We confront repeated rejection in a way that most other professionals do not. Our relationships may suffer from family members who fail to understand how art careers ‘work.’ They may resent that we bring in little money. There is often a maddening lack of congruity between artists’ abilities, sustained hard work, and reward. Engineers who excel at their job can make a good living, while highly skilled creatives may never reap financial benefits, even after a lifetime of effort. Frequently, artists must reckon with the success of others who have far less talent, depth, and dedication, while endlessly struggling to keep their own practice afloat. Finally, although many people suffer from early trauma and manage to survive and move on, it is in the nature of sone artists’ work to repeatedly re-expose themselves to pain through their practice.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 710
Shamans performing a ‘safe travels’ ritual for our group at Tiwanaku, Bolivia
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Mental health not only exists on a spectrum but it is also often culture-specific. Revered healers and sages in one country are the ‘crazies’ in another. Context determines whether we will be treated for illness, or simply considered ‘eccentric’ and left alone. Many who struggle to hide their differences, go against their own nature, and contort themselves into an acceptable demeanor to fit in, until they break down or die, undiagnosed.
Kate Kretz in Art From your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice”
Pearls from artists* # 709
Signing “Magisterial,” 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
The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him—on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire… There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.
Carl Jung quoted in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Steven Nachmanovitch
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Pearls from artists* # 708
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Free play must be tempered with judgment, and judgment tempered with freedom to play. We perform innumerable balancing acts, dances between opposite poles, each of which is necessary for life and art to exist. We have to live right on the balance point of an equi-valence between free flow of impulse and constant testing and questing for quality. With too little judgment, we get trash. We too much judgment, we get blockage. In order to play freely, we must have a command of technique. Back and forth flows the dialogue of imagination and discipline, passion and precision. We harmonize groundedness in daily practice with spiritedness in daily stepping out into the unknown.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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