Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 680
“Sacrificial” (on the wall) and “Trickster” (on the floor)
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What makes a work transcendent and powerful is a personal intensity, an ‘extra’ quality. Yet that intensity is exclusive to each artist: extra strangeness, subtlety, causticity, bravado, sensuality, rawness, grandiosity, succinctness, mystery, vulnerability, truth, etc. For an individual artist to infuse an object or an experience with their own ‘extra’ quality requires not only skill or ideas, but the profound benevolence of consistently delivering in spades.
It is this passion and genuine feeling, specific to each creator, that lives on in the art as a gift. It is wrapped up in the work, forever suspended in time. The artist says,
Here… everything I possessed in this moment is embodied in this object… All skills I have painstakingly learned, all of the knowledge I possess, the joy and pain I have felt and all the experiences I have lived. I spun these into the perfect, most sublime form, and packed it up, but for you to unwrap anytime you need sustenance. It will nourish, comfort, and surround you, because you have chosen it.
Each viewer selects which works of art speak to them… which embodied feelings, concepts, and knowledge they value. An empathic connection is forged through the art object or experience. What is love, but to say to someone, ‘you are truly seen and understood?’ Art offers this as well, by reaching out to puncture through the membrane of our emotional isolation, to articulate how we feel in the moments when we cannot find words. It tells the artist and viewer alike, ‘You are not alone. You are not alone in how your brain works. You are not alone in the pain you feel. You are not alone in what you notice or appreciate, or in how much love you have to give.’
Pour that love into an art object. It can handle all the devotion you pack into it, and more.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 629
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.
I kept coming back to [Ellen] Dissanayake. She’s for banning the word art altogether on the grounds it’s uselessly vague, and argues we shouldn’t treat art as a thing but as a behavior. Art, she claims, occurs anytime we take ordinary things and transform them into extraordinary experiences through a process she calls “making special.” Making special happens when words turn into poetry, flesh gets painted for a shaman’s ceremony, a B-flat meets a middle G to form the tune in a Peking opera. I liked her definition, which seemed less arbitrary than others I’d read and didn’t turn up its nose at blockbuster movies or Super Bowl halftime shows – which Dissanayake calls “the arts of our time.” As she sees it, art results from several key “operations” … Artists repeat… formalize… exaggerate… elaborate… and manipulate expectation… Break dancing, leading a tea ceremony, designing Grand Theft Auto – to Dissanayake, it’s art, art, and more art.
Bianca Bosker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
Comments are welcome!
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