Category Archives: Quotes
Pearls from artists* # 340
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What, do you suppose, are the lives of those who raise themselves above the level of the common herd? A continual struggle. A writer, for instance, must struggle against the laziness which he shares with the ordinary man when it comes to writing, because his genius demands to be heard, it is not merely of an empty desire for fame that he obeys, it is a matter of conscience. Let those who work coldly and calmly keep silence, for they have no conception of what it means to work under the spur of inspiration – the dread, the terror of rousing the sleeping lion whose roaring moves us to the very depth of our being. To sum up: be strong, simple, and true; here is an aim for every moment of the day, and it is always useful.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington
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Pearls from artists* # 338
*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 without symbolic depth results in ornament. Symbol without beauty results in psychoanalysis. Only when the two meet can we speak of art. The artistic works that combine the two elements most compellingly are what are called the classics. In his magisterial book The Analogical Imagination, the theologian David Tracy defines the classic as a work exhibiting a permanent “excess of meaning.” We speak of classics as “timeless,” he says, not because they belong to time, but because they are perpetually timely; their relevance never wanes, and each generation, each percipient, must interpret them anew. According to Tracy, we know we are dealing with a classic when a work makes us realize that our general outlook on life is not as complete as we thought it was, that “something else might be the case.” In the light that the classic emanates, things suddenly seem less clear-cut than they used to seem – we find ourselves in the presence of something greater than we are, something potentially infinite. Classics take us to the apex of the numinous, the point of what Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.”
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* # 336
*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 and symbol are the two faces of the numinous, that enigmatic force that bestows upon certain things, places, and moments an otherworldly power. It is the combination of radical beauty and symbolic resonance – of apparition and death – that makes aesthetic objects so overpowering. While at the surface there may appear to be an insurmountable difference between a Shinto shrine and a Tom Waits concert, both use beauty and symbol to confront us with what is strange and sacred in life. Their similarity is as profound as their differences.
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* # 334
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
This celebration, renewal and collision with the past and with the indians’ own identity, breaks down everyday order and routine to establish the magic dimension, the exception and the anomaly. An explosion of vitality, abundance and liberty demolishes everyday slavery and misery. But the festive chaos which transports one to the anomalous and to the sacred, simultaneously causes the return to profane normality. Just when the disorder and confusion reach the state of paroxysm, when everything is agitated and intermixed indiscrimanently, the celebration is over. The bands all play at the same time in deafening competition, the dancers can no longer hold themselves up, and all distinctions between groups, musicians, dancers and sexes are erased. It is the kacharpaya, the limit of disorder and cataclysm, which signals the return to routine.
To Cover in Order to Uncover, by Fernando Montes in Masks of the Bolivian Andes, Photographs: Peter McFarren, Sixto Choque, Editorial Quipos and BancoMercantil
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Pearls from artists* # 333
*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 Greeks and Romans both believed in the idea of an external daemon of creativity – a sort of house elf, if you will, who lived within the walls of your home and who sometimes aided you in your labors. The Romans had a specific term for that helpful house elf. They called it your genius – your guardian deity, the conduit of your inspiration. Which is to say, the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.
It’s a subtle but important distinction (being vs. having) and, I think, it’s a wise psychological construct. The idea of an external genius helps to keep an artist’s ego in check, distancing him somewhat from the burden of taking either full credit or full blame for the outcome of his work. If your work is successful, in other words, you are obliged to thank your external genius for the help, thus holding you back from total narcissism. And if your work fails, it’s not entirely your fault. You can say, “Hey, don’t look at me – my genius didn’t show up today!”
Either way, the vulnerable human ego is protected.
Protected from the corrupting influence of praise.
Protected from the corrosive effects of shame.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
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Pearls from artists* # 331
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country. People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translation by M.D. Herter Norton
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Pearls from artists* # 330
*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 take the time to look and analyze the city or a building or an object is of the same nature as owning it, except that ownership is not a satisfactory feeling – but understanding is a form of complete assimilation. To really work and produce, there must be integration of your work in your life, or the integration of your life in your work.
Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and interview 1923-1997, edited and with texts by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist
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