Category Archives: Quotes
Pearls from artists* # 120
In the studio, Photo: Britta Konau
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In solitude artists can experiment, make a mess, sustain notes for the joy of it, imagine themselves on any stage in any play. In the studio or practice room, they are not on display and need not wear their public face. They can be their silent selves, their worst selves. If there is unfreedom on the stage or in the gallery, there is freedom in the studio. As the visual artist Allen Kaprow put it, “Artists’ studios do not look like galleries, and when an artist’s studio does, everyone is suspicious.” Galleries are for show; studios are where messes are made and where the real work happens.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 119
“He and She”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
During the course of the past several years we have experienced a seismic shift in the way the world functions. Any notion of a certain or stable or inevitable future has vanished. We are living in what the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” No one’s life is predictable or secure. We are confronted with challenges never previously encountered, and these challenges weigh heavily on the role and responsibilities of the individual in society. It is the onus of each one of us to adjust, shift and adjust again to the constant liquid environment of fluid and unending change. In the midst of all this reeling and realignment, the moment is ripe to activate new models and proposals for how arts organizations [and artists] can flourish in the present climate and into an uncertain future.
What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling by Anne Bogart
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 118
Monet’s garden
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
MONET’S “WATERLILIES” (for Bill and Sonja)
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980) in Art and Artists: Poems
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 117
At work on a pastel painting
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Rote practice is not deep practice. Deep practice is slow, demanding, and uncomfortable. To practice deeply is to live deliberately in a space that is uncomfortable but with the encouraging sense that progress can happen. Deep practice is not rushed. Constant critical feedback is essential. Over time the effort alters neural pathways and increases skill.
Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 116
Preliminary sketch
* 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 is the point of all the discipline, hard work, and training? What does the training and preparation have to do with rehearsing a play and with performance? The training and the discipline and the sweating and the study and the memorizing are not the end point, but rather the entry. The preparation is what gives one the permission to take up space and make wild, surprising, and untamed choices. In the quest for artistic freedom and agency it is impossible to walk into a rehearsal room uninhibited, unburdened. We are generally chained down by habits and assumptions and by fear of the new. Permission is what we earn by the sweat, training, preparatory work and dedication.
Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays in art, theater, and storytelling
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 115
Giorgio de Chirico, “The Enigma of a Day,” oil on canvas, 6′ 1 1/4 x 55,” MoMA
* 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 DISQUIETING MUSES
From Two de Chiricos
[On Giorgio de Chirico]
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.
Something is wrong; something about the air,
It’s color; about the light, the way it goes.
Something about the silence of the square.
The muses in their fluted evening wear,
Their faces blank, might lead one to suppose
Something about the silence of the square.
Something about the buildings standing there.
But no, they have no purpose but to pose.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
What happens after that, one doesn’t care.
What brought one here – the desire to compose
Something about the silence of the square.
Or something else, of which one’s not aware,
Life itself, perhaps – who really knows?
Boredom sets in first and then despair…
Something about the silence of the square.
Mark Strand in Art and Artists: Poems, edited by Emily Fragos
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 114
Catalogue of Matisse’s late work
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
These paper cut-outs have their very pure existence, although they escape from your hands, from your scissors. Their paper matter with the fine play of light on their flexibility, the physical aspect of this flexibility, all combine to make something miraculous which loses its essence when it is placed flat. But it retains its essence when it is fastened to the wall with pins by Lydia. The paper then keeps the life I am talking about and undergoes incessant changes.
Matisse: A Second Life, 2005 Editions Hazan, James Mayor translator of the English version
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 113
Studio corner
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In Amsterdam I saw a striking still life painted by Rembrandt van Rijn suspended above a glass case that contained the same objects that he used as a model for the picture. The contrast between what felt like a drab collection of random objects in the case and the stunning luminescent painting that seemed imbued with nothing less than intense energy and life gave me pause and clarified something I had been thinking about. I had been thinking about the power of art to transform the frustrations and irritations of daily life into a realm of grace and to embody, through arrangement, composition, light, color and shade, nothing less than the secret elixir of life itself.
We encounter daily frustrations, irritations, and obstacles. Perhaps we feel hampered and limited by our hit-and-miss upbringing, our apparent limitations and our imperfect ongoing circumstances. And yet Rembrandt’s still life painting demonstrates that it is within our power to transform the random, the everyday, the frustrating and the prosaic into an arrangement instilled with grace and poetry. Is it the arrangement of these objects that lends such a spiritual quality to the painting? Is it the sensation of light captured upon canvas? How did Rembrandt transform the quotidian into an uplifting vision of life?
Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 112
New York, NY
* 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 the goal of art is Beauty and if we assume that the goal is sometimes reached, even if always imperfectly, how do we judge art? Basically, I think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us.
One standard, then, for the evaluation of art is the degree to which it gives us a fresh intimation of Form. For a picture to be beautiful it does not have to be shocking, but it must in some significant respect be unlike what has preceded it (this is why an artist cannot afford to be ignorant of the tradition within his medium). If the dead end of the romantic vision is incoherence, the failure of classicism, which is the outlook I am defending, is the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.
Robert Adams in Beauty in Photography
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Q: When you left the Navy you worked on commission as a portrait artist. Why don’t you accept commissions now?
Barbara’s studio
A: As I have often said, I left the active duty Navy in 1989, but stayed in the Reserves. The Reserves provided a small part-time income and the only requirement was that I work one weekend a month and two weeks each year. Plus, I could retire after 13 more years and receive a pension. (In 2003 I retired from the Navy Reserve as a Commander). The rest of the time I was free to pursue my studio practice.
For a short time I made a living making commissioned photo-realist portraits in soft pastel on sandpaper. However, after a year I became very restless. I remember thinking, “I did not leave a boring job just to make boring art!” I lost interest in doing commissions because what I wanted to accomplish personally as an artist did not coincide with what portrait clients wanted. I finished my final portrait commission in 1990 and never looked back.
To this day I remain reluctant to accept a commission of any kind. So I am completely free to paint whatever I want, which is the only way to evolve as a serious, deeply committed artist.
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 