Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 505
*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 myself was once “at the top: – with a book that sat on the bestseller list for more than three years. I can’t tell you how many people said to me during those years, “How are you ever going to top that?” They’d speak of my great good fortune as though it were a curse, not a blessing, and would speculate about how terrified I must feel at the prospect of not being able to reach such phenomenal heights again.
But such thinking assumes there is a “top” – and that reaching that top (and staying there) is the only motive one has to create. Such thinking assumes that the mysteries of inspiration operate on the same scale as we do – on a limited human scale of success and failure, of winning and losing, of comparison and competition, of commerce and reputation, of units sold and influence wielded. Such thinking assumes that you must be constantly victorious – not only against your piers, but also against an earlier version of your own poor self. Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play.
But what does any of that have to do with vocation? What does any of that have to do with the pursuit of love? What does any of that have to do with the strange communion between the human and the magical? What does any of that have to do with faith? What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations?
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Borders
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 496
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little bit, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we’ve learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.
Author’s Note, Ursula K. LeGuin in The Left Hand of Darkness
Comments are welcome!
Q: What do you think is an artist’s chief responsibility? Do you personally feel a responsibility to society?
Winter roses
A: All serious artists have the responsibility of developing our unique and special gifts to the best of our abilities and sharing our creative output with an appreciative audience. In other words we do good work and then we educate, and often create, the audience for it. This is the demanding, all-important task that gets me out of bed every day.
In showing what is possible artists cannot help but create a better society. Ours is essential work.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 176
Working on “Charade,” Photo: Marianne Barcellona
* 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 don’t demand a translation of the unknown. I don’t need to understand what it all means, or where ideas are originally conceived, or why creativity plays out as unpredictably as it does. I don’t need to know why we are sometimes able to converse freely with inspiration, when at other times we labor hard in solitude and come up with nothing. I don’t need to know why an idea visited you today and not me. Or why it visited us both. Or why it abandoned us both.
None of us can know such things, for these are among the great enigmas.
All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
It’s a strange line of work, admittedly.
I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* #172
Barbara in her 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 don’t need to understand what it all means, or where ideas are originally conceived, or why creativity plays out as unpredictably as it does. I don’t need to know why we are sometimes able to converse freely with inspiration, when at other times we labor hard in solitude and come up with nothing. I don’t need to know why an idea visited you today and not me. Or why it visited us bot. Or why it abandoned us both.
None of us can know such things, for these are among the great enigmas.
All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
It’s a strange line of work, admittedly.
I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 132
Las Cruces, 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.
… To feel confident and successful is not natural to the artist.
To feel insufficient.
to experience disappointment and defeat in waiting for
inspiration
is the natural state of mind of an artist.
As a result praise to most artists is a little embarrassing.
They cannot take credit for inspiration,
for what we can see perfectly, but we cannot do perfectly…
Agnes Martin quoted in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career by Stuart Horodner
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 