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Pearls from artists* # 226
Barbara at work, Photo: Marianne Barcellona
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value. All that must be regarded as exercise. Richter in his Treatise on Harmony, you see, says, “These are the principles of harmony and counterpoint; they have nothing whatever to do with composition, which is quite a separate activity.”
Ezra Pound in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Second Series, edited by George Plimpton
Comments are welcome!
Q: What qualities do you think mark the highest artistic achievement?
Barbara’s studio
A: If I may speak in the most general terms, several qualities come to mind that, for me, mark real artistic achievement:
- firm artistic control that allows the artist to create works that simultaneously demonstrate formal coherence while responding to inner necessity
- the creation of new forms and techniques that are adapted to expressing the artist’s highly personal vision
- an authentic and balanced fusion of form, method, and idea
- using material from one’s own idiosyncratic experiences and subtly transforming it in a personal inimitable way during the creative process
- the meaning of the thing created is rigorously subordinated to its design, which once established, generates its own internal principles of harmony and coherence
Comments are welcome!
Q: What has been your scariest experience as an artist?
“Between,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
A: I’d say it was the approximately six months in 2007 when I finished the “Domestic Threats” series and was blocked, certain that a strong body of work was behind me, but not knowing what in the world to do next. For a professional artist who had been prolific and non-stop for 21 years, this was a profoundly painful, confusing, and disorienting time. What I remember most is continuing to force myself to go to the studio any way and, for lack of anything productive to do there, spending long hours soul-searching and reading and thinking about art.
Eventually after all of this self-reflection I figured things out and had an epiphany. “Between,” with drastically simplified imagery, was the first painting in a new series, the “Black Paintings.” The series continues and if I may say so, includes some of my most accomplished work to date.
Comments are welcome!
