Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 559
“Sacrificial” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38” image, 70” x 50” framed
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
There are two images the spectator gets from every work of art: one while looking at the work, the other – the after-image – while remembering the work… the artist creates the after-image, the painter makes the painting.
Elaine de Kooning quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* # 558
Alexandria, VA
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
One of the main differences between the young girl who drew a line in chalk from the Metropolitan Museum all the way to her home on Park Avenue and the young woman who drew lines on canvas and paper twenty years later was that the latter understood the willfulness that drove the child. She was facing “the monster,” the consuming need to create, which was beyond her control but no longer beyond her comprehension. Helen [Frankenthaler] had long understood that her gift set her apart, and that it would be nearly impossible to describe how and why without sounding arrogant or cruel. “It’s saying I’m different, I’m special, consider me differently,” she explained years later. “And it’s also on the other side, a recognition that one is lonely, that one is not run of the mill, that the values are different, and yet we all go into the same supermarkets… and we all are moved one way or the other by children and seasons, and dreams. So the art separates you.”
The separation she described was not merely the result of what one did, whether it be painting or sculpting or writing poetry. Helen said the distance between an artist and society was due to a quality both tangible and intangible and intrinsic, a “spiritual” or “magical” aspect that nonartists did not always understand and were sometimes frightened by. “They want you to behave a certain way. They want you to explain what you do and why you do it. Or they want you removed, either put on a pedestal or victimized. They can’t handle it.” Helen concluded that existing outside so-called normal life was simply the price an artist paid to create.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 556
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.
The painter Paul Klee exclaimed in his diary, “Am I God? I have accumulated so many great things in me!” But we also remember these other words of Klee… “He who strives will never enjoy this life peacefully.” The lucky artist may be the one who, while in human measure a god, has nevertheless found satisfactory ways of escaping the relentless firing of his synapses.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Q: It must be tricky moving pastel paintings from your New York studio to your framer in Virginia. Can you explain what’s involved? (Question from Ni Zhu via Instagram)
“Impresario” partially boxed for transport to Virginia
A: Well, I have been working with the same framer for three decades so I am used to the process.
Once my photographer photographs a finished, unframed piece, I carefully remove it from the 60” x 40” piece of foam core to which it has been attached (with bulldog clips) during the months I worked on it. I carefully slide the painting into a large covered box for transport. Sometimes I photograph it in the box before I put the cover on (see above).
My studio is in a busy part of Manhattan where only commercial vehicles are allowed to park, except on Sundays. Early on a Sunday morning, I pick up my 1993 Ford F-150 truck from Pier 40 (a parking garage on the Hudson River at the end of Houston Street) and drive to my building’s freight elevator. I try to park relatively close by. On Sundays the gate to the freight elevator is closed and locked so I enter the building around the corner via the main entrance. I unlock my studio, retrieve the boxed painting, bring it to the freight elevator, and buzz for the operator. He answers and I bring the painting down to my truck. Then I load it into the back of my truck for transport to my apartment.
I drive downtown to the West Village, where I live, and double park my truck. (It’s generally impossible to park on my block). I hurry to unload the painting, bring it into my building, and up to my apartment, all the while hoping I do not get a parking ticket. The painting will be stored in my apartment, away from extreme cold or heat, until I’m ready to drive to Virginia. On the day I go to Virginia, I load it back into my truck. Then I make the roughly 5-hour drive south.
Who ever said being an artist is easy was lying!
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Pearls from artists* # 551
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.
A creative process is a philosophical search, shaped by matters of practice and procedure that extend from the first touch of the artist’s pencil, brush, or chisel to the final decisions about what constitutes completeness.
Stylistic particularism – the decision as to what kind of abstract or representational artist you’re going to be – shapes, deepens, and extends the artist’s imaginative powers. Most artists who work for many years see their style evolve, sometimes dramatically. In the 1930s and 1940s Giacometti, who had first been admired for Surrealist sculptures in which representational elements are set in essentially abstract structures, found himself increasingly focused on the direct observation of the human figure. What by the mid-1940s could look like a wholesale transformation of his artistic language was the result of individual decisions all of which, during Giacometti’s career of nearly five decades, interlocked. They reinforced one another. They added up.
Between Abstraction and Representation by Jed Perl in The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022
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Q: What advice would you give to a young artist with potential?
Barbara’s studio (since April 1997)
A: I last answered this question in my blog more than ten years ago and I would say similar things now to what I said then.
Be sure that you love your process unconditionally because there is no relationship between how hard you will work and how much money you will earn, period. Indeed, with inflation and rapidly evolving ways of doing business, it seems to cost more money every year to be an artist. As I’ve said often, be prepared to work very, very hard. Really it’s all about making the most of your gifts as an artist. If you don’t feel a deep responsibility to developing your talents as far as possible, you won’t have what it takes to keep going. Countless artists quit and no one can blame them. You absolutely must love your materials and your creative process and be willing to do whatever it takes to continue making art.
This is not a life for slackers!
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Pearls from artists* # 541
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The artist has to make the viewer understand that his world is too narrow. To do this is a task for the humanist.
– Anthony Tapies
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Pearls from artists* # 537
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
As often as the artist is criticized, he’s probably more often rejected. If you produce a product for which there is only a limited demand, if you ignore the requirements of the workplace, if you’re unlucky and unconnected, if you do work that is objectively inferior to the work of other artists in your territory, if you venture into new territory, if your message isn’t a bland one, then you’re more likely to experience rejection. The producer Don Simpson described life as a production executive at Paramount: ”You’re tired all the time, and you’re never in a great mood because you have to say no to 200 people a week. Ninety percent of your judgments are no. You offend people, you hurt people, you may damage people.”
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
Comments are welcome!
Q: Tell us about any other interests you may have besides your art practice. Does it get reflected in your art? (Question from artamour)
A: Travel is arguably the best education there is. My travels around the world, supplemented with lots of research once I return home, are an important part of my creative process. This is how I develop ideas to forge a way ahead. It is difficult and solitary work.
Even though I became an artist later in life, travel as a source of inspiration found ME. And it has been a blessing! People around the world have become fans. Many send messages of thanks saying they are proud that some aspect of their country’s culture has inspired my work. I am always grateful and touched to know this.
I love old movies, especially early silent films, classic noir and horror films from the 1930s and 1940s, and anything by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Wells. Probably this interest is most evident in the way I composed and designed pastel paintings in my early “Domestic Threats” series. I’m not sure it’s discernible in subsequent work.
Another passion is swimming. Four times a week I swim at a local pool. I love it! In my view swimming laps is the best exercise to help maintain fitness and to prepare for the focus and physicality I need in the studio.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 532
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Far from offering an escape from the world, the arts present one of the most difficult and hard-fought ways to enter into the life of our time or any other time. What the artist must first accept is the authority of an art form, the immersion in what others have done and achieved. Once the artist has begun to take all that in – it’s a process that never really ends – there comes the even greater challenge of asserting one’s freedom. It’s the limits imposed by a vocation that makes it possible to turn away from the pressures of the moment and think and feel freely – and sometimes, give the most private emotions an extraordinary public hearing. If art is the ordering of disorderly experience, and I don’t know how else to describe it, then the artist must be true both to the order and to the disorder. These are the trials of the artist and the artistic vocation. They shape the experience of anybody who reads a novel or looks at a painting or listens to a piece of music.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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