Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 640
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When an artist changes and develops over the years, as is natural to any creative person, such change is met by howls of protest from the marketers. Sometimes an artist (or teacher, scientist, or spiritual guru) starts with something extraordinary, becomes a star, and then their gift is either frozen or perverted.
The growing and risky edge of creative work is devalued, treated as a frill or extracurricular activity decorating the routine of ordinary life. There are few mechanisms available for the artist to construct a self-sustaining way of living and working. “One gathers,” says Virginia Woolf,
“from the enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a book of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally, material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poems in their misery dead” – that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
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Pearls from artists* # 449
*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 learned about the Japanese word irimi while studying Aikido, a Japanese martial art. Simply translated, irimi means ,’to enter’ but it can also be translated ‘choose death.’ When attacked you always have two options: to enter, irimi, or to go around, ura. Both when accomplished in the right manner, are creative. To enter or to ‘choose death’ means to enter fully with the acceptance, if necessary, of death. The only way to win is to risk everything and be fully willing to die. If this is an extreme notion to Occidental sensibilities, it does make sense in creative practice. To achieve the violence of decisiveness, one has to ‘choose death’ in the moment by acting fully and intuitively without pausing for reflection about whether it is the right decision or if it is going to provide the winning solution.
It is also valuable to know when to use ura, or going around. There is a time for ura, going around, and there is a time for irimi, entering. And these times can never be known in advance. You must sense the situation and act immediately. In the heat of creation, there is no time for reflection; there is only connection to what is happening. The analysis, the reflection and the criticism belong before and after, never during, the creative act.
Anne Bogart in “A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater”
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Pearls from artists* # 335
Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Federico Diez de Medina, a mask collector and archaeologist, offers a view based on an analysis of many masks and other artifacts from the Tiwanaku area. He suggests that the first masks were to exorcise evil spirits. To be effective, they had to be frightening.
“On the other hand,” he imagines, “it was obligatory for the high dignitaries in the great Aymara empire – the apus, malkus and curacas – to wear masks… for pronouncing judgments and for rites associated with religious observance, death and war, as well as for the varied dances of the seasonal rituals and other festivities. They also had to preside at sports events and decide the winners of numerous open air activities.” Among these pursuits the author mentions the jaltiris (races), ch’akusiris (fist fights), khorawasiris (slingshot) and mich’isiris (shooting darts or arrows).
Masks of the Altiplano by Manuel Vargas in Masks of the Bolivian Andes, Photographs: Peter McFarren, Sixto Choque, Editorial Quipos and BancoMercantil
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Pearls from artists* # 61
White Sands, NM
* 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 can only shudder when I think of life without our handiwork. The sheer paucity of living only for the sake of survival and empty diversion would be that of an empty vessel. My own life as an artist helps me to fill that vessel, and on occasion I am able to share that with another. Is there meaning in my struggle, my endless solitude? Yes, I believe there is, for at the very least I have found greater meaning for myself in that search. And as those artists who have come before me have perhaps more clearly expressed, our ability to ponder the questions that denote our humanness are worthy of a life of solitude. That is where I find my solace and my courage. In the final analysis, it is the art that I make that allows me to pause and briefly see. Only now do I begin to understand and accept both the burden and joy of my life.
Dianne Albin quoted in Eric Maisel’s The Van Gogh Blues
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Pearls from artists* # 30
East Hampton house
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And, just as the analysis of a film by a psychoanalyst can tell us about some implications and some sources of a labour that is all the less tightly under our control since the material problems we encounter during it make us insensible to tiredness and leave our unconscious quite free, so the interpretation of one of our works by the mind of an outsider can show it to us from a new, and revealing perspective.
How disturbed we should be, were there some machine that would allow us to follow the thousand brains in a cinema! No doubt, we should stop writing. We should be wrong to do so, but it would be a hard lesson. What Jules de Noailles said (recounted by Liszt) is true: ‘You will see one day that it is hard to speak about anything to anyone.’ Yet it is equally true that each person takes in or rejects the sustenance that we offer, and that the people who absorb it, do so in their own way; and this it is that determines the progress of a work through the centuries, because if a work were to send back only a perfect echo, the result would be a kind of pleonasm, an inert exchange, a dead perfection.
Andre Bernard and Claude Gauteur, editors, Jean Cocteau: The Art of Cinema
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