Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 151
“The Storyteller,” 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 am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place – irrespective of my subject – where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.
On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
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Pearls from artists* # 140
“Big Wow,” 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.
Frankly, I think you’re better off doing something on the assumption that you will not be rewarded for it, that it will not receive the recognition it deserves, that it will not be worth the time and effort invested in it.
The obvious advantage to this angle is, of course, if anything good comes of it, then it’s an added bonus.
The second, more subtle and profound advantage is that by scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from one creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer:
Do you make this damn thing exist or not?
And once you can answer that truthfully for yourself, the rest is easy.
Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
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Pearls from artists* # 130
Studio corner
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In the aesthetic act something comes to life. That’s a good phrase for it, comes to life, suggesting both something separate, apart from life, extra, from elsewhere, and something not alive in the act of being invested with life. The phrase brought to life does this same double take.
Ali Smith in Artful
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Pearls from artists* # 77
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.
Current possibilities far exceed any single artist’s capacity to engage them. Indeed, every known way of making art ever undertaken in all of history is included in today’s inventory of creative options. Thus, choices must be made. This has had a profound effect upon the quantity and diversity of skills needed to become an artist today. In addition to such conventional forms of artistic talent as visual acuity, manual dexterity, sensitivity, intelligence, ingenuity, and perseverance, contemporary artists must also be able to make judicious choices from a limitless inventory of alternatives. A decisive aspect of the creative act involves choosing a place amid possibilities that are as bountiful as they are eclectic and chaotic. Even this process entail choices. In staking the territory they wish to occupy, artists may be gluttons or ascetics, connoisseurs or commoners. Relationships between artists and their career choices may be lifelong and monogamous, or sequentially monogamous, polygamous, or promiscuous. But artists’ options even exceed selecting precedents. Free access to the past is amplified by freedom to augment the catalogue of creative options by contributing something new.
In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art by Linda Weintraub
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Pearls from artists* # 73
Sri Lanka
* 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 primary tool in a creative process is interest. To be true to one’s interest, to pursue it successfully, one’s body is the best barometer. The heart races. The pulse soars. Interest can be your guide. It always points you in the right direction. It defines the quality, energy, and content of your work. You cannot feign or fake interest or choose to be interested in something because it is prescribed. It is never prescribed. It is discovered. When you sense this quickening you must act immediately. You must follow that interest and hold on tight.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
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Pearls from artists* # 71
New York street
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists are individuals willing to articulate in the face of flux and transformation. And the successful artist finds new shapes for our present ambiguities and uncertainties. The artist becomes the creator of the future through the violent act of articulation. I say violent because articulation is a forceful act. It demands an aggressiveness and an ability to enter into the fray and translate that experience into expression. In the articulation begins a new organization of the inherited landscape.
My good friend the writer Charles L. Mee, Jr. helped me to recognize the relationship between art and the way societies are structured. He suggested that, as societies develop, it is the artists who articulate the necessary myths that embody our experience of life and provide parameters for ethics and values. Every so often the inherited myths lose their value because they become too small and confined to contain the complexities of the ever-transforming and expanding societies. In that moment new myths are needed to encompass who we are becoming. These new constructs do not eliminate anything already in the mix; rather, they include fresh influences and engender new formations. The new mythologies always include ideas, cultures and people formerly excluded from the previous mythologies. So, deduces Mee, the history of art is the history of inclusion.
Ann Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
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Pearls from artists* # 67
Negombo, Sri Lanka
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
John Robin Baitz: I was just thinking that you still manage to write with some kind of miraculous hope.
Athol Fugard: You’ve got to. Implicit in the act of creation on the part of the artist is: I make it because I want to share it with you. At the end of my process you are waiting for me… Pascal says “Imagine a cell in darkness and the inmates are shackled together. Every morning at dawn, the door opens and the person at the end of the line is taken out and executed and the door is closed. Those left behind read their fate in the opening and closing of the door every day. it is a metaphor of the human condition.” That is Pascal.
Camus comes to that paragraph and says, “There is no question about it – that is an image of the human condition. What do we do during those 24 hours between the opening and closing of the door? Do we cry? Or do we tap the next person in the chain and say ‘What’s your name? I’m Athol Fugard. Who are you?'” And that’s how we create meaning. At the end of the process you are waiting. And that is the act of faith. That is the hope that every artist has.
Quoted by Anne Bogart in “and then you act: making art in an unpredictable world”
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Pearls from artists* # 65
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
To create demands a certain undergoing: surrender to a subconscious process that can yield surprising results. And yet, despite the intuitive nature of the artistic process, it is of utmost importance to be aware of the reason you create. Be conscious about what you are attempting or tempting. Know why you are doing it. Understand what you expect in return.
The intentions that motivate an act are contained within the action itself. You will never escape this. Even though the “why” of any work can be disguised or hidden, it is always present in its essential DNA. The creation ultimately always betrays the intentions of the artist. James Joyce called this invisible motivation behind a work of art “the secret cause.” This cause secretly informs the process and then becomes integral to the outcome. This secret cause determines the distance that you will journey in the process and finally, the quality of what is wrought in the heat of the making.
Anne Bogart in and then, you act: making art in an unpredictable world
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