Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on a large 58” x 38” pastel painting tentatively called, “Jokester.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 404
“Broken,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″ image, 50″ x 70″ 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.
Before we can even think of ecological rescue, global disarmament, or economic reform, we must find a way back to what science fiction writers call our homeworld. The term encompasses more than the biosphere; it also includes our homes, our places of work, our communities, families, friends, and lovers. It includes our technologies and tools, the physical body, the sensible soul, and the unconscious psyche. We need a faith to restore our capacity to feel, to affect and be affected with the same passionate intensity as our forebears, whose powers of feeling astound us so in the records and art of the past. The death of affect, to borrow a phrase from JG Ballard, is the true catastrophe of our spectral age, our spiritual Hiroshima. It makes questions such as whether life’s riddles are answered at the Vatican, in Tibet, or by the Large Hadron Collider utterly meaningless, since it removes the ground we need to pose such questions in the first place. Neither religion nor science can give us back the ground. Only the imagination can. Only art can mend the rupture of the soul and the world, the body and the earth.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Q: Do you have a favorite art book?
Favorite art book
A: Since I have quoted numerous passages from it on Wednesdays in “Pearls from artists,” it should come as no surprise that I am enamored of “Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action” by JF Martel. This gem has become a bible to be read and reread as an endless source of wisdom, inspiration, and solace for myself and for other contemporary artists. I even referred to it while writing the mission statement for New York Dreamers Art Group, the artists’ collective founded earlier this year.
Were someone to ask “what one book would you recommend that every visual artist read?”, Martel’s masterwork is my answer. It is a constant companion kept in my backpack to reread at odd times whenever I have spare moments. I keep finding new insights to savor and ponder and still cannot get enough of this terrific book!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 403
“Avenger,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
*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 that doctor who opens you up, does exactly the right thing, closes you up – and you die. He failed to take the chance that might have saved you. Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art.
Morty Feldman quoted in Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Q: Do you have a favorite among your thousands of travel photographs from around the world?
Tile worker, South India
A: I do! It is this photograph of a family matriarch filling a water jar. I don’t remember the name of the village, but it was somewhere in South India at a clay-tile-making workshop.
Walking in, I immediately stopped in my tracks. Had I just traveled back in time to some 18th century workshop? I found her appearance and demeanor extraordinary! (Regretfully, I did not ask her name). She was tiny, yet she was the boss whose authority and judgement were beyond question. After observing her move around the studio for a few minutes, I asked if I might have a photograph. She immediately struck this arresting and classic pose. I smiled to myself, “Obviously, she has done this a few times!”
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Pearls from artists* # 402
“Conundrum,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Rodin was lonely before his fame, and perhaps after the fame that came to him still lonelier. For fame is actually only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke quoted in Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Travel photo of the month*
Carlos the camel saying, “Cheese,” Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India
* Favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog.
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Pearls from artists* # 401
“Prophecy,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 58″ x 38″ Image, 70″ x 50″ 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.
Said [Larry] Rivers,
You could be poor and think your life worthwhile – the dance of the mind, the leap of the intellect. If you made art that did not sell immediately, or ever, you could still be involved in a meaningful, inspiring activity that was a reward in itself, and you could show it to the people you dreamed of thrilling with your efforts; your friends were your audience. They were sitting on your shoulder watching you work. That was the opera of the time… Pursuit of a career and commercial success was selling out, losing one’s soul. In painting, writing, music, and dance, nothing could be more shameful.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: Progress is slower than usual during the current pandemic lockdown. I continue working on “Trickster,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 400
In the studio with friends
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
A student in the audience raised her hand and asked me:
“Why should I live?”
… In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and the richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy – the ability to like , love, respect, help, and show kindness – and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.
Stephen Pinker in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
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