My blog turns 5 years old today! Here is the very first post from July 15, 2012. Q: What does it take to be an artist, especially one living and working in New York?
Barbara’s Studio with works in progress.
A: The three Big P’s – Patience, Persistence, and Passion. Without all three you will not have the stamina to work tirelessly for very little external reward. You can expect help from no one.
There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? Above all it’s about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts and love of our hard-fought creative process.
And, my God, it even gets harder as we get older! So what do we do? We dig in that much deeper. It’s a most noble and sacred calling – you know when you have it – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we are all true heroes!
If you were to visit my studio now, you would see more tables chock full of pastels and notice other changes from the photo above. Most importantly though, what I wrote five years ago still rings true!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 256
“Offering,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
* 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 saw what skill was needed, and persistence – how one must bend one’s spine, like a hoop, over the page – the long labor. I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me the most joyful of circumstances – a passion for work.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* # 255
Barbara at work on “The Storyteller”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… several basic assumptions I have about the need for authenticity:
- Because in the end there is no other kind of art.
- I could have used the word ‘originality,” rather than authenticity, if the word’s root in “origin,” as in, “from the depth or source,” is recognized. However, the word implies a certain newness, “never done before,” that authenticity does not, and art in general does not need, in order to be deeply personal.
- Something that is authentic “rings true” for us. It comes from an inner truth. We draw from a source that is inner-directed rather than outer-directed, to use Maslow’s expression about self-actualization.
- Creating work that is authentic has a sacredness about it. It may be a way out – a small way perhaps, but at least a personal way – of a social dynamic that is all economics, consumerism, greed, and disregard for inner life. The word “science” comes from a root meaning “to separate.” Our cultural world view has been deeply influenced by that. Anything that we come to authentically in our artistic expression demands a personal inner synthesis. It is experience and insight won firsthand. The more we assimilate our “experience” from the advertising/media/consumer/government perspective the less authentic it will be.
- Most of what we express creatively is prelinguistic. The deeper insights are obviously coming from somewhere. They are not logically structured in the mind, but it may take logic to get them expressed.
- Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to the world if you paint or dance or write. The world can probably get by without your efforts. But that is not the point. The point is what the inner process of following your creative process will do, to you. It is clearly abut process. Love the work, love the process. Our fascination will pull our attention forward. That, also, will fascinate the viewer.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I’m working on a large pastel painting based on a photograph shot when I was vacationing recently in La Paz, Bolivia. How fortuitous to stumble upon a mask exhibition at The National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore! It felt as though the exhibition somehow was staged for me, just waiting for me to come along and photograph it.
Incredibly, I returned to New York, after a spectacular trip to Bolivia, and found myself with photographs that are inspiring a new series. Certainly this has never happened before! The series is tentatively called, “Bolivianos.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 254
“Survivors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″ image, 28 1/2″ x 35″ framed
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
An artist learns by repeated trial and error, by an almost moral instinct, to avoid the merely or the confusingly decorative, to eschew violence where it is a fraudulent substitute for power, to say what he has to say with the most direct and economical means, to be true to his objects, to his materials, to his technique, and hence, by a correlated miracle, to himself.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Q: How can you tell with certainty when a pastel painting is finished?
“Poker Face,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
A: For me a work is finished when to add or subtract some element causes the composition to diminish or somehow weaken. It’s mostly a matter of where I want viewers to look and how I decide to lead their eyes around a painting.
I work on each piece for several months so that by the time it’s nearly done, I can no longer see flaws. I put it aside for a week or two. Then I pull it out again, turn it upside down, and any details that need improving become obvious. Once I fix them, I know the painting is finally finished and ready to be signed, photographed, and delivered to my framer.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 253
Barbara’s studio with works in progress
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor. Neither is the purity of art the innocence of childhood, if there is such a thing. One’s life as a child, with all its emotional rages and ranges, is but grass for the winged horse – it must be chewed well in those savage teeth. There are irreconcilable differences between acknowledging and examining the fabulations of one’s past and dressing them up as though they were adult figures, fit for art, which they will never be. The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work – who is responsible to the work.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
Comments are welcome!
Q: What would you say is your underlying motivation as a contemporary artist?
Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia
A: What motivates me is the desire to make great art, to develop my innate talents to their fullest, to share the hard-won knowledge I have gained along the way, and to bring as much beauty into this life as possible. It’s never been easy, but I’m trying to spend my short time on this earth as an artist, doing the work I was always meant to do!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 252
Above the Panamerican Highway in southern Peru
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, a deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
Comments are welcome!
