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Q: What is your best time of day to paint?

The High Line - Barbara's morning commute to the studio

The High Line – Barbara’s  morning commute to the studio

A:  I have always been an early riser and a morning person, from my student pilot days when I’d be at an airport in New Jersey ready to takeoff in a Cessna by 6 a.m., through my days as a Naval officer starting work at the Pentagon at 7, until now when I typically get up before 6 (thanks to my cat, who likes to eat breakfast early).  Always I am most energetic in the mornings so that’s when I am most productive and have my best ideas.  Generally, I try to arrive at the studio before 10 a.m. and work until 5 p.m. or later.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 31

A corner of Barbara's studio

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.

When we are children we unquestioningly see the objects around us as alive; we speak to them, give them names, breathe life into them.  The imagination knows no bounds.  As we grow up, we gradually lose this facility, until we finally arrive in an utterly “demystified” world that draws clear boundaries between what is alive and what is not, between subjective and objective perception.  According to Sigmund Freud, culture is the only domain in our modern society that gives a measure of legitimacy to the persistence of this infantile desire to see things as animate.  In the field of art, imagination is the precondition on which fiction of any sort rests; in art, mental states can be projected onto objects and images, but not in social reality or the sciences.

Dietrich Karner in Animism:  Modernity Through the Looking Glass

Comments are welcome!