Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 659
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Your only goal is to be the purest and strongest version of yourself, and to articulate that as fully as possible through your creations. Avoid any enticements that threaten to eclipse the priority of your work, to lure you off in another direction toward a different goal. You are here to spend a lifetime exploring and refining what excites you.
Like Olympic athletes, trailblazing artists do not waste a second looking around at their competition to measure how they are doing. They do not look to the sidelines to measure their applause. They just keep moving forward, in the focused direction of their vision. When you possess a quiet, solid confidence and you are completely unshaken (not even a twitch) when someone looks at your work and says, ‘I don’t really like it,’ you have arrived. If you are not there yet, keep practicing. The opinions of others are simply the ever-shifting clouds, moving across your infinite azure sky.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 623
The 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.
Jealousy? Hmmm. Jealousy links up with competition. It’s hard to compete, really compete, in the art world. That’s why award ceremonies are a little suspect. Athletes can compete. I don’t know how much you can really compete as an artist. You can compete with yourself.
You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio you are after something that does not yet exist. Maybe it’s the same for a runner. I don’t know. But with running, or swimming, or gymnastics, or tennis, the achievement is measurable. Forget about competition. Rather, commit yourself to find out the true nature of your art. How does it really work; what’s the essence of it? Go for that thing that no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn’t come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing. It comes from concentration, and from your own ability to be fascinated endlessly with the story, the song, the jump, the color you are working with.
I know this sounds a little monkish or even sort of “holier than thou,” but I really do believe it. And that said, jealousy is a human sentiment. Few of us are above it. John Lahr, a writer, told me that the major emotion in Los Angeles is envy. I have to say he’s probably right. And a lot of it has to do with how close or far from an Academy Award one is. And LA, the capital of smoke and mirrors, would have sone believe that the award is just a step away. When you drive down Hollywood Boulevard, some of the dreamers look as though the dream ate them alive.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 334
Masks at the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
This celebration, renewal and collision with the past and with the indians’ own identity, breaks down everyday order and routine to establish the magic dimension, the exception and the anomaly. An explosion of vitality, abundance and liberty demolishes everyday slavery and misery. But the festive chaos which transports one to the anomalous and to the sacred, simultaneously causes the return to profane normality. Just when the disorder and confusion reach the state of paroxysm, when everything is agitated and intermixed indiscrimanently, the celebration is over. The bands all play at the same time in deafening competition, the dancers can no longer hold themselves up, and all distinctions between groups, musicians, dancers and sexes are erased. It is the kacharpaya, the limit of disorder and cataclysm, which signals the return to routine.
To Cover in Order to Uncover, by Fernando Montes in Masks of the Bolivian Andes, Photographs: Peter McFarren, Sixto Choque, Editorial Quipos and BancoMercantil
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 