Category Archives: Quotes
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Pearls from artists* # 636
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Some artists will rework a piece for half a lifetime before they know it is finished. An improviser may have to practice for years before being able to play a totally spontaneous minute of music in which every detail is right for its own fleeting moment. The great scientists and scholars are not those who publish or perish at any cost, but rather those who are willing to wait until the pieces of the puzzle come together in nature’s own design. The fruits of improvising, composing, writing, inventing, and discovering may flower spontaneously, but they arise from soil that we have prepared, fertilized, and tended in the faith that they will ripen in nature’s own time.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 635
Dinard, 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.
The body of writing takes a thousand different forms,
and there is no right way to measure.
Changing, changing at the flick of a hand, its various
forms are difficult to capture.
Words and phrases compete with one another, but the
mind is still master.
Caught between the unborn and the living, the writer
struggles to maintain both depth and surface.
He may depart from the square, he may overstep the
circle, searching for the one true form of his reality.
He would fill the eyes of his readers with splendor, he
would sharpen the mind’s values.
The one whose language is muddled cannot do it;
only when mind is clear can language be noble.
Lu Chi quoted in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life by Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Pearls from artists* # 635
Bourges, 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.
When we focus on the future, we do one of three things. We fantasize, which involves big dreams that are mostly for fun and entertainment; we dwell, which involves focusing on all the bad stuff that might happen – this was the official pastime of my hometown – or we hope, which involves envisioning the future while recognizing the inevitability of challenges. Interestingly, more hopeful people anticipate setbacks along the way and work to remove them. And yet I always imagined that hopeful and optimistic people are just born that way…
The Book of Hope: A survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams with Gail Hudson
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Pearls from artists* # 634
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.
Sometimes I think, “Well, why on Earth do I feel hopeful? Because the problems facing the planet are huge and if I analyze them carefully, they do sometimes seem impossible to solve. So why do I feel hopeful? Partly, because I’m obstinate. I just won’t give in. But it’s partly also because we cannot accurately predict what the future might bring. We simply can’t. No one can know how it will all turn out.
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams with Gail Hudson
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