Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 431
New York Harbor
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Writer Stanley Elkin suggested that all books retell the Old Testament story of Job. Similarly one feels that behind most music there is a struggle with pain. By the time we are adults, the songs we know by heart are often those that acknowledge grief or celebrate release, and the performers we respect are the ones who sing from need – people like Etta James, of whom it was said that she “always hit the notes with the right amount of hurt and hope.”
A photographer’s subject is his or her score, the given notes on a page. The way the photographer hits these notes – shows the subject – determines whether we will be newly reconciled with it.
Robert Adams in Art Can Help
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Pearls from artists* # 349
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.
If Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and so many others were able to create great artistic works, it was because they were able to pull off something few adults can find it in themselves to do: they were able to suspend all final judgments about life and the universe in order to play…
The spirit of work is concerned with self-preservation. It evaluates concepts and ideas in terms of their practical value. Building roads, raising walls, running elections, debating policies, educating the young – all of these are purposive actions ultimately aimed at upholding social structures, changing those structures, or promoting one’s place within society. The spirit of work is the home of the ego, the part of us that has evolved to survive and thrive. One of the conditions of the artistic creation seems to be the ability to move frame this frame of mind into the spirit of play. As many artist have said in varying ways, the trick is to forget everything and create for the sake of creating. No worthwhile play, of course, is without effort. As the painstaking care Flaubert put into every line of his books makes clear, the spirit of play is sometimes the most exciting. Nevertheless, art remains in essence a game, an activity undertaken for its own sake, no matter how difficult. Like all games, it requires the establishment of a perimeter within which things that one might take very seriously in ordinary life are given only relative value. The perimeter suspends all the conventional rules, allowing the artist to turn the world on its head and let the imagination roam freely.
No sooner have we entered the spirit of play than we see things differently.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 138
A corner of 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.
BM: … so many artists value the sense of retaining something of the child, like the strangeness that children have where they’ll just make a gesture or say something that we filter as adults.
MM: Sometimes people think that it is childish, but it’s not, it is child-like. People get confused. One of the things we are trying to do as artists – it’s not romantic – is to get to a point where we are seeing things in a fresh way, in a way that we’ve never seen them before, the way children do. So we are acknowledging the magic in every moment we have.
BM: And it’s not a form of nostalgia, but the history of an entire human being.
MM: Exactly. Rather than nostalgia it is teaching us how to be present.
Conversations with Meredith Monk by Bonnie Marranca
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