Category Archives: Quotes
Pearls from artists* # 647
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.
My life is a collage, with time cutting and rearranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting. I wonder if traditional perspective is a necessary discipline for the art student, for over the years my life has taken on its own pattern and formed its own rules, adapting events and chronology in the sifting process of memory. As a mature artist, I can take liberties with perspective. We are not made of straight lines. As Picabia said: ‘Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction.’
Eileen Agar in A Look at My Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 646
Signing “Apparition,” 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.
We are the sum of our unique, individual life experiences. The trials we have faced, the causes we fight for, the fears that haunt us, the oddities of our minds; all of these and more become the food for our spirit. The universe does not need repetition from the past; another pretty, but pointless nude, sunlit but stale impressionist landscape, or old and cold minimalist cube. It needs you. It needs you to strip away all that clouds your genuine sense of self. It needs you to unearth and unabashedly own your messy, honest, and magnificent truth. And it needs you to deepen and shape that truth into an authentic core, one that will nourish you and your work for a lifetime.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 645
New York City
*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 critical that developing voice be an intensive, holistic process. Just as we cannot simply dip our bucket into the shallow pool of our culture and emerge with any substantial yield, we cannot generate deep, meaningful work unless we cultivate a deep, meaningful life. We must enlarge and intensify our way of being in the world, even as its forces conspire to distract, numb, and dumb us down… Regardless of the situation into which we were born, we can conjure our own expansive journey, guided by altruistic ideals, as we follow our vision. Being an artist is a way to simultaneously exist on a higher plane of consciousness while moving through our brief lives on this planet.
The art world is a business system that creates and follows trends. ‘Hot topics’ generate buzz only to become stale and replaced months later. However, the process of finding voice is timeless, even though the end products evolve with time.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 643
Sunset over Jersey City
*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 the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own visions, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace quoted in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice by Kate Kretz
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 642
New York City
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Radical changes in our culture threaten to undermine the potency of art and artists alike. Disparate forces conspire to lower the bar for how we expect art to function. As decades go by, we are educating and evolving to value left-brain strengths over holistic right-brain thought, with disastrous consequences for humanity… Deep contemplation has been hijacked by addictive technology. Rising authoritarianism strives to squash dissenting and diverse voices, as well as historical truths and critical thinking skills. Social media approval affects the art that is produced, shared, and validated. Easily digested work is promoted, while the most compelling work (the kind that could transform the trajectory of art, or affect real social change) is left behind. Critics are coining terms like ‘Zombie Formalism’ … and ‘Zombie Figuration’ … in response to the sterility and stultifying sameness of much contemporary work. It’s as if artists were absorbing online algorithms into their bloodstreams. This empty, safe sensibility riffs and rehashes a vacuous culture, generating a perpetual cycle of well-branded insignificance.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 641
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.
Artistic voice is the most critical aspect of creative practice, yet it is rarely taught…
Some schools teach ‘ideation’ (conceptualizing a work or series), but that is very different from cultivating an essential core that is uniquely your own. Ideation is a Band-Aid to get you through your next few projects, while voice is a consistent, profound, and idiosyncratic wellspring that you own. It is born of your singular fascinations, obsessions, and life experiences, both weighty and mundane. If you make the effort to build and consistently replenish it, this well will deepen, yielding creative riches over the course of your entire life. Cultivating visual voice needs to be a cornerstone of art education, not an afterthought.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 640
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When an artist changes and develops over the years, as is natural to any creative person, such change is met by howls of protest from the marketers. Sometimes an artist (or teacher, scientist, or spiritual guru) starts with something extraordinary, becomes a star, and then their gift is either frozen or perverted.
The growing and risky edge of creative work is devalued, treated as a frill or extracurricular activity decorating the routine of ordinary life. There are few mechanisms available for the artist to construct a self-sustaining way of living and working. “One gathers,” says Virginia Woolf,
“from the enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a book of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally, material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poems in their misery dead” – that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 639
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.
… my deep and lifelong conviction [is] that the results of my work don’t have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work itself. That’s a hard enough job. I refuse to take on additional jobs, such as trying to police what anybody thinks about my work once it leaves my desk.
Also, I realized it would be unreasonable and immature of me to expect that I should be allowed to have a voice of expression, but other people should not. If I am allowed to speak my inner truth, then my critics are allowed to speak their inner truths, as well. Fair’s fair. If you dare to create something and put it out there, after all, then it may accidentally stir up a response. That’s the natural order of life: the eternal inhale and exhale of action and reaction. But you are definitely not in charge of the reaction – even when the reaction is bizarre.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 638
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.
I was in the presence of a woman [Grace Hartigan] who had sacrificed everything, including her only child, to be what she was: an artist. The rewards had been few, beyond a life well-lived (not materially, but spiritually) and the recognition in her waning years that she had been honest about who she was and what she needed. A rare accomplishment for a woman of any generation, it was particularly so of hers, when servitude to family was the only goal toward which a “healthy” woman was to aspire. Grace was living proof that, on the contrary, a life dreamed could be a life lived. All it took was courage, commitment, and humor. I remember both of us laughing a lot that afternoon. Though the subject was serious, the stories Grace told were fantastic and the woman who recounted them was as wild as the twenty-six-year-old who had abandoned everything in 1948 to paint, though she wasn’t even sure how.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 637
St. Malo, Brittany, France
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
After periods during which one has actively tried to solve a problem, but has not succeeded, the sudden right orientation of the situation, and with it the solution, tend to occur at moments of extreme mental passivity… A well-known physicist in Scotland once told me that this kind of thing is generally recognized by physicists in Britain. “We often talk about the Three B’s,” he said, “the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That’s where the great discoveries are made in our science.”
In my experience travel helps, too!
Wolfgang Koehler quoted in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 