Category Archives: Quotes
Pearls from artists* # 528
*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 good reasons to stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life.
First of all, it’s annoying. Every artist complains, so it’s a dead and boring topic. (From the volume of complaints that emerges from the professional creative class, you would think these people had been sentenced to their vocations by an evil dictator, rather than having chosen their line of work with a free will and open heart).
Second, of course it’s difficult to create things; if it wasn’t difficult, everyone would be doing it, and it wouldn’t be special or interesting.
Third, nobody ever really listens to anybody else’s complaints, anyhow, because we’re all too focused on our own holy struggle, so basically, you’re just talking to a brick wall.
Fourth, and most important, you’re scaring away inspiration. Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended. It’s almost like inspiration puts up its hands and says, “Hey, sorry buddy! I didn’t realize my presence was such a drag. I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative living Beyond Fear
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Pearls from artists* # 527
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Vocation was originally a religious term. The word comes from the Latin vocatio, which means a summons, a call. To be a priest, a monk, or a nun is to accept a calling – a vocation. The sense of an imperative – of an activity that’s a necessity, an inevitability – remains very much part of the meaning of the word today. A creative vocation isn’t a job. It’s a calling, even if for most modern artists the summons is an inner necessity, not the call of some divine figure or force. Even an artist as determinedly secular as Picasso saw echoes of religious vocation in his experience as an artist. When his mistress Francoise Gilot, wondering at his concentration and stamina, asked him if when he was painting “it didn’t tire him to stand so long in one spot,” this was his response: “No. That’s why painters live so long. While I work, I leave my body outside the door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque.” For creative spirits the studio or stage – or wherever they do their work – is a place apart. They may recoil from describing this as a sacred space, but there’s no question that these spaces have a special significance.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 526
*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 things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.
Leonora Carrington quoted in Painting Herself, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, in The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2022
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Pearls from artists* # 525
* 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 reflects the inner necessity of the arts, the creative spirit’s determination to make something that can stand on its own, precisely because it’s rooted in rules, systems, and processes that are immune to the vagaries of politics, society, and day-to-day life. It’s the discipline of art that frees the artist to go public with the most private thoughts and feelings. No matter how the world encroaches on the artist, the artist in the act of creation must stand firm in the knowledge that art has its own laws and logic. These are the fundamentals of the creative vocation.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 524
*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 made a decision a long time ago to recite affirmations to myself every morning in order to stay on the right track. I first start out with The Lord’s Prayer, then I thank God for the blessings that have been bestowed on me, then I ask for preservation of health, and then close with a very purposeful statement about who I am and who I want to be. Affirming myself every morning is a very important part of my daily routine, because if I don’t know who I am, someone else will decide for me. You’ve got to know who you are and where you come from in order to get where you want to go! Believing in yourself and filling your mind and soul with purpose is essential to being able to create meaningful art.
Quincy Jones in the liner notes for We Are by Jon Batiste
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Pearls from artists* # 523
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
How strange the human mind is! When I first began, I think I should have been willing to work at it from the top of a church steeple, whereas now, even to think of finishing requires a real effort. And all this, simply because I have been away from it for so long. It is the same with my picture and with everything else I do. There is always a thick crust to be broken before I can give my whole heart to anything; a stubborn piece of ground, as it were, that resists the attack of plough and hoe. But with a little perseverance the hardness suddenly gives and it becomes so rich in fruit and flowers that I am quite unable to gather them all.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
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Pearls from artists* # 522
* 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 moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington
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Pearls from artists* # 521
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
But on the whole, I’m taking into consideration, at the point of the cut, where the audience’s eye is and what direction it’s moving, and with what speed. The editor has to imagine the audience’s point of attention when the film is projected, and has to be able to predict where ninety-nine percent of the audience is looking at any moment… I have to be able to say with some certainty that at such-and-such a moment ninety-nine percent of the audience will be looking at this point on the screen, and in the next second they will be looking here. That means that their eye is travelling, say, left to right, to the upper corner of the frame, at a certain speed. If I choose to cut at this point – at frame 17 – I know that at that moment their eye is right here, in the Cartesian grid of the screen.
That’s a very valuable piece of information. When I select the next shot, I choose a frame that has an interesting visual at exactly that point, where the audience’s eye is at the moment of the cut, to catch and redirect their attention somewhere else. Every shot has its own dynamic. One of the editor’s obligations is to carry, like a sacred vessel, the focus of attention of the audience and move it in interesting ways around the surface of the screen.
This is exactly what I do as I work to compose my pastel paintings! – BR
In The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
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Pearls from artists* # 520
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Ondaatje: Do you think success and failure can distort the lessons an artist is able to learn?
Murch: There’s that wonderful line of Rilke’s, “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.” Recognizing that all of our achievements are doomed, in one sense – the earth will be consumed by the sun in a billion years or so – but in another sense the purpose of our journey is to go farther each time. So you’re trying things out in every film you make, with the potential of failure. I think we’re always failing, in Rilke’s sense – we know there’s more potential that we haven’t realized. But because we’re trying, we develop more and more talent, or muscles, or strategies to improve, each time.
In The Conversation: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
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Pearls from artists* # 519
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Because the arts are the products of a process that stands apart from so much of our social, economic, and political life, they move us and excite us unlike anything else in our lives. When we rush to label them – as radical, conservative, liberal, gay,straight, feminist, Black, or white – we may describe a part of what they are, but we’ve failed to account for their freestanding value. And without that the arts are nothing. The artist in the act of creation – working through particular words, sounds, colors, shapes, and their infinite combinations – almost inevitably risks irrelevance. But the decision to reject doing in favor of making, which some have described as a retreat into self-absorption and narcissism, is in fact an act of courage. Artists reenter the world by sending the work that they’ve made back into the world, where it lives on – independent, inviolable – in what Auden called ”the valley of its making.” That is a place apart – paradoxically, triumphantly apart.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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