Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 590
Barbara’s Studio: when you fall in love with pastel!
*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 see again and again in the lives of special artists a profound youthful infatuation with their medium, with everything and anything connected with it – the good, the bad, the indifferent. If books have mesmerized them, they will read everything; if painting, they will frequent every gallery, running to every visiting show. They may have no idea that they are about to devote their life to that medium; they simply fell in love. The actor Len Cariou said:
“I didn’t have any thoughts about being an actor. I always was an actor. I’d go to films every Saturday. I had an insatiable appetite for films. You could see four films and a serial for half a buck. In 1959 when I read an ad in the local paper, ‘Young actors wanted for summer stock,’ all of a sudden I knew; there was a crunch in my head.”
… The artist is transported by his medium, is delighted and astonished. That his medium is able to speak to him in this way is almost a proof of the existence of god, or at least a special affirmation in the realm of the spirit.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 319
“She Embraced It and Grew Stronger,” 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.
Ultimately, whether we judge an artistic work to be enjoyable or not may be immaterial when we consider the effect it has on us. A film might affect us in profound ways even though we found it difficult to watch or failed to grasp the point, if any, that the filmmakers were trying to get across. Most people have experienced artistic works that, although their own egos may have found them lacking in certain respects, continued to work on them long afterward, subtly altering them whether they wished it or not. The crucial factor isn’t whether we have been amused or delighted by a work but whether we have let the forces within it penetrate the closed perimeter of our lives and expand our horizons. True sensibility, real good taste, involves the ability to recognize when such forces are present, and to distinguish between superficial reactions and the deeper affects these forces elicit.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 