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Pearls from artists* # 393
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… Fernhoffer’s a man in love with our art, a man who sees higher and farther than other painters. He’s meditated on the nature of color, on the absolute truth of line, but by dint of so much research, he has come to doubt the very object of his investigations. In moments of despair, he claims that drawing doesn’t exist and that lines are only good for rendering geometrical figures, which is far from the truth, since with line and with black, which is not a color, we can create a human figure. There’s your proof that our art is like nature itself, composed of an infinity of elements: drawing accounts for the skeleton, color supplies life, but life without a skeleton is even more deficient than a skeleton without life. Lastly, there’s something even truer than all this, which is that practice and observation are everything to a painter; so that if reasoning and poetry argue with our brushes, we wind up in doubt, like our old man here, who’s as much a lunatic as he is a painter — a sublime painter who had the misfortune to be born into wealth, which has allowed him to wander far and wide. Don’t do that to yourself! A painter should philosophize only with a brush in his hand!
Honore Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you lose yourself in your work?
A: Of course! When I am having a productive day in the studio, I am completely present and focused, fully immersed in solving technical problems and trying to improve the painting on my easel. I barely notice the time and have to remind myself to take a break or stop for lunch. Nothing else exists except the painting and my relationship with it. The rest of life completely falls away from my consciousness.
I believe most artists regularly experience this feeling of ‘flow.’ It is a state of being that is inherent and necessary to creative work of all kinds.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 226
* 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?
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!