Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 603
With friends in Alexandria, VA
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The annals of art and science are full of studies of men and women who, desperately stuck on an enigma, have worked until they reached their wit’s end, and then suddenly made their longed-for creative leap of synthesis while doing errands or dreaming. The ripening takes place when their attention is directed elsewhere.
Insights and breakthroughs often come during periods of pause or refreshment after great labors. There is a prepatory period of accumulating data, followed by some essential but unforeseeable transformation. William James remarked in the same vein that we learn to swim in winter and skate in summer. We learn that which we do not concentrate on, the part that has been exercised and trained in the past but that is now lying fallow. Not doing can sometimes be more productive than doing.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 375
Tile worker in South India
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
With the camera you interpret reality. Photography is not truth. The photographer interprets reality and, above all, constructs his own reality according to his own awareness or his own emotions. Sometimes it’s complicated because it’s a kind of schizophrenic phenomenon. Without the camera, you see the world in one way, with the camera, in another. Through the window, you’re composing, and even dreaming about, this reality as if, through the camera, you were synthesizing what you are with what you’ve learned of a certain place. Then you make your own image, your own interpretation. The same thing happens to a writer as to a photographer. It’s impossible to capture the truth of life.
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs
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Pearls from artists* # 101
Teleidoscope
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Everything you do in life informs your work. You walk around thinking about it all the time, dreaming about it. It’s just there. At a certain point it simply doesn’t go away.
Joanne Akalitis quoted in Anne Bogart’s Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews
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