Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 671
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
As a young woman—girl, actually; I was seventeen when I started taking pictures—it would appear that I didn’t have a thing to worry about from the gods. My total lack of promise is exhibit number one in the prosecution of my argument that it is work, and more work, that makes an artist. Proust became Proust that way, indeed furiously working himself to death. But you don’t have to do that—don’t kill yourself in your cork-lined room, don’t be Mozart dying from exhaustion at thirty-five, just put your head down and steadily, resolutely, pull the load.
Sally Mann in Art Work: On the Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Travel photo of the month*
New York, NY
*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
I wasn’t actually traveling when I took this photo, but I am posting it anyway because I just love it. River ice is my favorite thing about winter in New York. And it has been years since I have seen ice on the Hudson River!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 602
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.
Anyone who studies an instrument, sport, or other art form must deal with practice, experiment, and training. We learn only by doing. There is a gigantic difference between the projects we imagine doing or plan to do and the ones we actually do. It is like the difference between a fantasied romance and one in which we really encounter another human being with all his or her complexities. Everyone knows this, yet we are inevitably taken aback by the effort and patience needed in the realization. A person may have great creative proclivities, glorious inspirations, and exalted feelings, but there is no creativity unless creations actually come into existence.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 582
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Strange, but the artist has never made a fuss about being denied those estimable virtues other men would not do without: intellectuality, good judgment, a knowledge of the world, and rational conduct. It may be charged, that he has even fostered the myth. In his intimate journals Vollard tells us that Degas feigned deafness to escape disputations and harangues concerning things he considered false and distasteful. If the speaker or subject changed, his hearing immediately improved. We must marvel at his wisdom since he must have only surmised what we know definitely today: tThat the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth. It is understandable, then, how the artist might actually cultivate this moronic appearance, this deafness, this inarticulateness, in an effort to evade the million irrelevancies which daily accumulate concerning his work. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, edited by Christopher Rothko
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 553
Starting a new pastel painting
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We think of the procrastinator as lazy and inactive, but procrastination is active. Not to get all psychological and heavy on you, but procrastination is actually “active avoidance.” I like the word active because it shows just how powerful your avoidance tendencies are.
It takes all kinds of forms – writer’s block and disorganization are two of the most common. I’ve known people who have mild forms of it, and I’ve known people who are absolutely crippled by it, who never accomplish what they set out to do.
… the most heavy-handed thing I can say is: If you procrastinate, you are only robbing yourself.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Living in the Arts – For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
Comments are welcome!
Q: What does it feel like when you dop off a pastel painting at your Virginia framer’s shop? Are you sorry to see it go? (Question from Caroline Golden)
A: Actually, just the opposite since I have been looking at it on my easel for more than three months. Typically, I’m glad to say goodbye – temporarily – because I know when I pick it up in a month, I will have gained some distance and can begin to see and think about it more objectively. I can start reflecting on how this pastel painting relates to my overall body of work.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 513
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… you will never be able to create anything interesting out of your life if you don’t believe that you’re entitled to at least try. Creative entitlement doesn’t mean behaving like a princess or acting as though the world owes you anything whatsoever. No, creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that – merely by being here – you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.
The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement “the arrogance of belonging,” and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life. Without this arrogance of belonging, you will never be able to take any creative risks whatsoever. Without it, you will never push yourself out of the suffocating insulation of personal safety into the frontiers of the beautiful and the unexpected.
The arrogance of belonging is not about egotism or self-absorption. In a strange way, it’s the opposite; it is a divine force that will actually take you out of yourself and allow you to engage more fully with life. Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection). The arrogance of belonging pulls you out of the darkest depths of self-hatred – not by saying “I am the greatest!” but merely saying “I am here!”
Elizabet Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* #498
*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 first time I ever went to a meeting where they discussed any of my books academically,” she chuckled, “a Canadian Scholar was going to discuss The Left Hand of Darkness. He didn’t know that I was going to be there. When I walked in, he was appalled. He looked at me with a savage look on his face and said, ‘Just don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing.’ That’s a basic thing, actually, between scholars and artists. I think, ‘Oh, is that what I was doing? Or Is that why I did that? and it’s very revealing. But the fact is, you cannot know that while you’re doing it. The dancer can’t think, Now I’m going to take a step to the left. That ain’t the way you dance.”
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and other Conversations, edited and with an introduction by David Streitfeld
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 485
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
[Michael] Ondaatje: It’s an odd thing: I’ve heard you talk about the importance of ambiguity in film, and the need to save that ambiguous quality which exists in a book or painting, and which you think a film does not often have. And at the same time in a mix you are trying to “perfect” that ambiguity.
[Walter] Murch: I know. It’s a paradox. And one of the most fruitful paradoxes, I think, is that even when the film is finished, there should be unsolved problems. Because there’s another stage, beyond the finished film: when the audience views it. You want the audience to be co-conspirators in the creation of this work, just as much as the editor or the mixers or the cameraman or actors are. If by some chemistry you actually did remove all ambiguity in the final mix – even though it had been ambiguous up to that point – I think you would do the film a disservice. But the paradox is that you have to approach every problem as if it’s desperately important to solve it. You can’t say, I don’t want to solve this because it’s got to be ambiguous. If you do that, then there’s a sort of hemorrhaging of the organism.
O: And more of a confusion.
M: Yes. I keep thinking about it, and it’s a wonderful dilemma: you have to acknowledge that there must be unsolved problems at each stage. As hard as you work, you must have this secret, unspoken hope that one very significant problem will remain unsolved. But you never know what that will be until the film is done. You can almost define a film by the problem it poses, that it can’t answer itself, that it asks the audience to solve.
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
Comments are welcome!
Q: What was the first New York gallery that represented your work and how did they find you?
A: My first (and still the best) New York gallery was Brewster Gallery on West 57th Street in what, in 1996, was the most important gallery district in Manhattan. By joining Brewster, my work was exhibited alongside an impressive list of Latin American painters and sculptors such as Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Francisco Zuniga, Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Francisco Toledo, and more. Brewster was a prestigious and elegant gallery, well-known throughout the Latin American art world for their superb exhibitions and their contributions to art history scholarship.
Since I am not Latina, my work was selected by virtue of its Mexican subject matter and level of craftsmanship. Mia Kim, the owner/director, told me that amidst so many deserving, unrepresented, and talented artists of Latin American heritage, she was sometimes challenged to defend her decision to represent me. Mia’s response was always, “Barbara may not be of Latin American ancestry, but she most assuredly has the soul of a Latina! Her work has obvious affinities to Leonora’s, the other non-Latina that we represent.”
In July of 1996, while I was still living in Virginia, I mailed a slide sheet and reviews to Brewster, thinking that during the slow summer months, perhaps someone might actually LOOK at my material. Then I forgot all about it as Bryan and I headed off on a trip to Mexico. While we were in Mexico City, something told me to check our phone messages at the house in Alexandria. I did so and was floored to hear Mia offer me representation and a two-person show in October. The first time she would even see my work in person would be when I delivered it to the gallery!
In October my “Domestic Threats” pastel paintings were paired with work by Cuban artist, Tomas Esson, for an exhibition called “Monkey Business.” The opening was extremely well-attended by a sophisticated international New York crowd. A highlight was meeting Leonora Carrington, one of my artist heroes of long standing. Afterwards a large group of us were wined and dined at a French restaurant around the corner on West 58th Street. I remember looking at Bryan and saying, “I think I’ve made it!” The next day there was a favorable review in a publication called, “Open Air.” After working in complete obscurity for thirteen years, I was finally on my way.
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 