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Pearls from artists* # 682
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Following Julie’s lead, I’d started viewing the everyday the way I looked at art – with an extra beat, with an inquisitive eye, with a willingness to linger on form and ask why. I’d gone into her studio hoping to see art differently. Bit by bit, I saw everything differently. Have you contemplated the forlorn beauty of a stripped-down storefront glowing white on a dark street? Or watched tarps draped on construction sites shiver with the wind? Like nibbling on a magic mushroom, turning an eye on reality makes you feel as if the world is performing just for you.
Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Friends Who Taught Me How to See
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Pearls from artists* # 681
Giverny by DH, 2023, in David Hockney 25, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If you want to lose faith in the concept of “good” art, just consider all the artists who were brushed aside as feckless losers in their own day – El Greco, Van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne, the list goes on – only to get their own museum wings and their paintings plastered on tote bags today.
Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Friends Who Taught Me How to See
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Pearls from artists* # 631
*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 could see motion when I looked at Julie’s work. Her hand had moved there, in that way. She’d chosen this blue over that one. Seeing the act of creation – the way a work doesn’t come out fully formed but grows by fits and starts – made we aware of how delicate and fragile an artwork was. How improbable it was that it existed. Someone had agonized over this square inch. They’d poured themselves into that flink of a line. I thought of the bewildering piles of supplies I’d seen in studios: Vaseline, turpentine, wax, Q-tips, chopsticks, marble dust. It’s not magic that makes a piece. All the Hollywood visions of possessed artists throwing pieces together in a trance-like state overlooked the fact that this was work. Each piece may have started with an idea, but there was more to it than that. “An idea is not a painting,” Julie said, as she worked, her nose practically grazing the canvas. She was already thinking ahead to how she’d fix the brushyness of the tights, maybe go over the shoes again. The soul of the artwork needed a body. Seeing Julie work gave me a path to follow into the piece.
Bianca Bosker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
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Pearls from artists* # 629
Basquiat X Warhol Exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Photo: Christine Marchal
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… scientists are right there with artists in insisting art is fundamental to being human. Art is one of our oldest creations (humans invented paint long before the wheel), one of our earliest means of communication (we drew long, long, long before we could write), and one of our most universal urges (we all engage with art, whether preschoolers, Parisians, or Paleolithic cave dwellers). I began to notice that art – or what scientists dispassionately call “human-made two- or three-dimensional structures that remain unchanged: – was everywhere: hung over the register at the hardware store, spray-painted on a bakery window, cock-eyed in a dive-bar bathroom. As humans, we’ve filled our lives with art since practically forever. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia, where around 45,000 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testifies for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting a portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J.Z. Young. “They are as necessary as food or sex.”
Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
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