Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 229
“Epiphany,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
After his own cancer diagnosis, [Donald] Hall writes: “If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.” There is this – only this. It would be good to keep these words in mind when we wake up each morning. Get done what you can. And then the rest is gravy.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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Pearls from artists* # 228
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.
… we’re plagued by the certainty that we haven’t quite achieved what we’d hoped we could. The work is only as good as our small, imperfect, pedestrian selves can make it. It exists in some idealized form, just out of reach. And so we push on. Driven by a desire to get it right, and the suspicion that there is no getting it right, we do our work in the hopes of coming close. There’s no room in this process for an overblown ego. A career – whether it takes us to Cap d’Antibes or to the Staybridge Suites off the interstate – can be the result, but if it’s the goal, we’ve lost before we’ve even begun.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 225
Morning sun at 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.
It’s so easy to forget what matters. When I begin the day centered, with equanimity, I find that I am quite unshakeable. But if I start off in that slippery, discomfiting way, I am easily thrown off course – and once off course, there I stay. And so I know that my job is to cultivate a mind that catches itself. A mind that watches its own desire to scamper off into the bramble, but instead, guides its own desire gently back to what needs to be done.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 220
Lima, Peru
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It is the job of the writer to say, look at that. To point. To shine a light. But it isn’t that which is already bright and beckoning that needs our attention. We develop our sensitivity – to use John Berger’s phrase, our “ways of seeing” – in order to bear witness to what is. Our tender hopes and dreams, our joy, frailty, grief, fear, longing, desire – every human being is a landscape. The empathic imagination glimpses the woman working the cash register at a convenience store, the man coming out of the bathroom at the truck stop, the mother chasing her toddler up and down the aisle of the airplane, and knows what it sees. Look at that. This human catastrophe, this accumulation of ordinary blessings, of unbearable losses. And still, a ray of sunlight, a woman doing the wash, a carcass of beef. The life that holds us. The life we know.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 219
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.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, the expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even need to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine satisfaction, a blessed unrest that keep us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro
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Pearls from artists* # 218
Untouched sandpaper
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Let go of every should or shouldn’t running through your mind when you start. Be willing to stand at the base of a new mountain, and with humility and grace, bow to it. Allow yourself to understand that it’s bigger than you, or anything you can possibly imagine. You’re not sure of your path. You’re not even sure where the next step will take you. When you begin, whisper to yourself: I don’t know.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 217
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.
This is true for most artists, not only writers.
What I do know – what I’ve spent the past couple of decades learning about myself – is that if I’m not writing, I’m not well. If I’m not writing, the world around me is slowly leached of its color. I am crabby with my husband, short-tempered with my kid and more inclined to see small things wrong with my house (the crack in the ceiling, the smudge prints along the staircase wall) than look out the window at the blazing maple tree, the family of geese making its way across our driveway. If I’m not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 216
Working on “Charade”
* 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 is true for all artists, not only writers.
The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail – not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. “Ever tried, ever failed,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It requires what the great editor Ted Solotoroff once called endurability. It is this quality, most of all, that I think of when I look around a classroom at a group of aspiring writers. Some of them will be more gifted than others. Some of them will be driven, ambitious for success or fame, rather than by the determination to do their best possible work. But of the students I have taught, it is not necessarily the most gifted, or the ones most focused on imminent literary fame (I think of these as short sprinters), but the ones who endure, who are still writing, decades later.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
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