Blog Archives
Q: Can you describe a single habit that you believe contributes to your professional success?
Barbara’s studio with work in progress
A: It’s probably the fact that I keep regular studio hours. Contrary to the cliche of artists working in spurts, I continually work in the studio at least seven hours a day, five days a week, with Wednesdays and Sundays as my days off. I devote another two hours or so in the mornings and evenings for art business tasks: email, sending out jpegs, social media, etc. I always remember something Katharine Hepburn said: “Without discipline there is no life.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 175
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 know this is a sentimental cliché, but I do feel toward my books very much as a parent must toward his children. As soon as someone says, “I did like your short stories, but I don’t like your novels,” or, “Of course, you only really came into your own with Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” – then immediately I want to defend all my other books. I feel this especially about Hemlock and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes – one child a bit odd but exciting, the other competent but not really so interesting. If people say they like one book and not the other, then I feel they can’t have understood the one they don’t like.
Angus Wilson in The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work 1st Series, edited and with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley
Comments are welcome!
Q: I’m convinced that some information and ideas are hidden, or even encrypted in the environment we live in, so we need a way to decipher them. Maybe one of the roles of an artist is to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature. What’s your opinion about this?
Barbara’s studio
A: I agree. Artists in general are more sensitive to these sorts of hidden ideas, feelings, emotions, etc. in ways that most non-artists are not. It’s a cliche but it’s true.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 112
New York, NY
* 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 the goal of art is Beauty and if we assume that the goal is sometimes reached, even if always imperfectly, how do we judge art? Basically, I think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us.
One standard, then, for the evaluation of art is the degree to which it gives us a fresh intimation of Form. For a picture to be beautiful it does not have to be shocking, but it must in some significant respect be unlike what has preceded it (this is why an artist cannot afford to be ignorant of the tradition within his medium). If the dead end of the romantic vision is incoherence, the failure of classicism, which is the outlook I am defending, is the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.
Robert Adams in Beauty in Photography
Comments are welcome!
Q: At the end of last Saturday’s (September 28th) post you mentioned something called, “Esala Perahera.” What is that?
Waiting for the Perahera to start, Kandy, Sri Lanka
Mending an elephant’s headdress, Kandy, Sri Lanka
Preparations – planning what to do in case an elephant charges
Flame throwers watching a man balancing on one stilt
First elephant in the procession
Drummers, Kandy, Sri Lanka
Three elephants, Kandy, Sri Lanka
A single “tusker,” Kandy, Sri Lanka
Esala Perahera, Kandy, Sri Lanka
After the festival
A: My trip to Sri Lanka was timed so that I could observe it first hand. Here is a description from the “Insight Guide to Sri Lanka:”
The lunar month of Esala is a month for festivals and peraheras all around the island. Easily the finest and the most famous is the Esala Perahera held at Kandy over the ten days leading up to the Esala Poya (full moon) day (late July or early August). The festival dates back to ancient Anuradhapura, when the Tooth Relic (of the Buddha) was taken through the city in procession, and the pattern continues to this day, with the relic carried at the head of an enormous procession which winds its way round and round the city by night. The perahera becomes gradually longer and more lavish over the 10 days of the festival, until by the final night it has swollen to include a cast of hundreds of elephants and thousands of dancers, drummers, fire-eaters, acrobats, and many others – an extraordinary sight without parallel anywhere else in Sri Lanka, if not the whole of Asia.
I would go further and add that the Esala Perahera is one of the world’s great festivals. Who could ever imagine such a spectacle? It may be a cliché to say it, but travel is ultimately the best education.
Comments are welcome!
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