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Q: Is there anything you wish you could change about life as a visual artist?
Barbara’s Studio
A: While there is much to admire and maybe even envy about being an artist, it does have some downsides. Among these, for me, is that enormous amounts of solitude are required to create art. I wish this were not the case.
Our work is entirely unique and because it starts as an idea in our heads, we must work solo to bring it into the world. We spend our days pondering, looking, and reacting, rather than speaking to anyone. As typical workdays go, it is rather odd.
I sometimes envy filmmakers who require collaboration with a large team of experts in order to practice their art. They have fellow professionals with whom they can discuss their ideas and they can solicit advice on how to make improvements. Artists rarely have this luxury.
On the other hand, visual artists don’t have to wait for anyone else to do their jobs before we can get to work. We don’t have to deal with personality conflicts or other people’s agendas. Our individual creative process is generally free of obstacles created by others. When you really think about it, the only thing that is required of an artist is to go to the studio and get to work! We are free to make our own rules and our own schedules, and, creatively speaking, are largely responsible for our own advances and setbacks.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 396
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.
To summarize, art is expression. Expression is nonutilitarian and has no purpose beyond itself. Early on this led me to define works of art as things whose only function is to be perceived. Since the appearance of such things in everyday life breaks the drift of habit for which we have been hard-wired by evolution, art always occurs as an interruption. In the course of time, humans have produced innumerable works of art, subordinating them to innumerable ends according to the needs of the hour, yet all art exhibits a primal quality that exceeds those appropriations. Because the inherent multivalence of art threatens the desire to reduce things to clear significations, human societies have a tendency to overlook it, with the result that a great many aesthetic objects are called art when they are perhaps something else. To clarify this distinction I called art designed to serve instrumental reason “artifice.” In its worst forms, artifice amounts to aesthetic manipulation of a kind that is indisputably hostile to the ideals of openness, plurality, freedom of thought, and rational disclosure that we were told were the cornerstones of modernity. Art, on the other hand, is innately emancipatory, being itself the affirmation or sign of freedom.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 166
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.
An interesting discussion at Leblond’s about geniuses and outstanding men. Dimier thinks that great passions are the source of all genius! I think that it is imagination alone or, what amounts to the same thing, a delicacy of the senses that makes some men see where others are blind, or rather, makes them see in a different way. I said that even great passions joined to imagination usually lead to a disordered mind. Dufresne made a very true remark. He said that fundamentally, what made a man outstanding was his absolutely personal way of seeing things. He extended this to include great captains, etc. and, in fact, great minds of every kind. Hence, no rules whatsoever for the greatest minds; rules are only for people who merely have talent, which can be acquired. The proof is that genius cannot be transmitted.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
Comments are welcome!
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