Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 587
With friends of fifty years!
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
My general preparations include everything I do to be healthy and ready for surprises, with a full palette of resources available. I need energy to acquire skill, energy to practice, energy to keep going through the inevitable setbacks, energy to keep going when things look good and I am tempted to sit back and relax. I need physical energy, intellectual energy, libidinal energy, spiritual energy. The means to tapping these energies are well known: exercise the body, eat well, sleep well, keep track of dreams, meditate, enjoy the pleasures of life, read and experience widely. When blocked, tap into the block-busters: humor, friends, and nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* #571
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.
To put it simply, but accurately, artists are often lost to the world because of their obsessions with their art. They may be just as lost as they prepare to work or incubate a new idea as in those feverish days when they make their final cuts on a film or race toward a publishing deadline. They may obsess about artistic questions and feel bursts of creative energy day or night, alone or in the company of others, in the middle of the work week or on vacation in the Bahamas.
Lost in time and space, the artist may feel more connected to Picasso, Emily Dickinson, Ingmar Bergman, Gertrude Stein, Handel, or Tennessee Williams than to the people in his immediate world. The living past holds extraordinary meaning for him. He travels elsewhere, removing his spirit and attention from the present. He may reside, as he works on his novel, in the childhood of a character, walking the garden paths and living the household dramas there. He may come upon a Rembrandt drawing and find himself wrenched, not to any particular place or time, but just elsewhere, as he experiences the greatness of his traditions, measures himself anew, and dreams again of his future.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 570
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.
One of the main differences between the young girl who drew a line in chalk from the Metropolitan Museum all the way to her home on Park Avenue and the young woman who drew lines on canvas and paper twenty years later was that the latter understood the willfulness that drove the child. She was facing “the monster,” the consuming need to create, which was beyond her control but no longer beyond her comprehension. Helen [Frankenthaler] had long understood that her gift set her apart, and that it would be nearly impossible to describe how and why without sounding arrogant or cruel. “It’s saying I’m different, I’m special, consider me differently,” she explained years later. “And it’s also on the other side, a recognition that one is lonely, that one is not run of the mill, that the values are different, and yet we all go into the same supermarkets… and we are all moved one way or another by children and seasons, and dreams. So that art separates you…”
The separation she described was not merely the result of what one did, whether it be painting or sculpting or writing poetry. Helen said the distance between an artist and society was due to a quality both intangible and intrinsic, a “spiritual” or “magical” aspect that nonartists did not always understand and were sometimes frightened by. “They want you to behave a certain way. They want you to explain what you do and why you do it. Or they want you removed, either put on a pedestal or victimized. They can’t handle it.” Helen concluded that existing outside so-called normal life was simply the price an artist paid to create.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 558
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.
One of the main differences between the young girl who drew a line in chalk from the Metropolitan Museum all the way to her home on Park Avenue and the young woman who drew lines on canvas and paper twenty years later was that the latter understood the willfulness that drove the child. She was facing “the monster,” the consuming need to create, which was beyond her control but no longer beyond her comprehension. Helen [Frankenthaler] had long understood that her gift set her apart, and that it would be nearly impossible to describe how and why without sounding arrogant or cruel. “It’s saying I’m different, I’m special, consider me differently,” she explained years later. “And it’s also on the other side, a recognition that one is lonely, that one is not run of the mill, that the values are different, and yet we all go into the same supermarkets… and we all are moved one way or the other by children and seasons, and dreams. So the art separates you.”
The separation she described was not merely the result of what one did, whether it be painting or sculpting or writing poetry. Helen said the distance between an artist and society was due to a quality both tangible and intangible and intrinsic, a “spiritual” or “magical” aspect that nonartists did not always understand and were sometimes frightened by. “They want you to behave a certain way. They want you to explain what you do and why you do it. Or they want you removed, either put on a pedestal or victimized. They can’t handle it.” Helen concluded that existing outside so-called normal life was simply the price an artist paid to create.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 516
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
In Oruro, Bolivia, devotion to the Virgin del Socavon (Virgin of the Mineshaft) migrated from the fixed festival of Candlemas (2 February) to the movable feast of Carnival. By delaying their public devotion to the Virgin until the four-day holiday before Ash Wednesday, Oruro’s miners were able to enjoy a longer fiesta than if they had confined it to a single saint’s day. During Oruro’s Carnival, thousands of devils dance through the streets before unmasking in the Sanctuary of the Mineshaft to express devotion to the Virgin.
Evidently, the festive connotation of devils is not always demonic. In Manresa [Spain], the demons and dragons celebrate the restoration of liberty after a brutal civil war and subsequent dictatorship [General Francisco Franco]. In Oruro… the masked devils protest exploitation of indigenous miners by external forces and devote themselves to a Virgin who blesses the poor and marginalized. Festive disorder generally dreams not of anarchy but of a more egalitarian order.
Max Harris in Carnival and other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance
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Pearls from artists* # 345
Barbara working on an interview. Photo: Maria Cox
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
You begin your journey as an artist from sacred motives, with dreams and high hopes, and also, perhaps, from a place of painful turmoil or other inner necessity. From these powerful drives comes your conscious decision to pursue a life in art, your resolve to call yourself an artist whatever the consequences. You are the one nodding in agreement when the painter John Baldessari says, “Art is about bloody-mindedness. It’s not about living the good life. In the end, it’s just you and the art.”
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 325
“Myth Meets Dream,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 47″ x 38″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Homo sapiens is the animal that means something, or that desperately wants to mean something. Undoubtedly our thirst for meaning has a lot to do with our petrifying awareness of death, itself a side effect of the imagination, and one that makes our unique position as much of a curse as it is a gift.
As the prime fruit of the imagination, art is the incontrovertible sign of humanity’s presence on earth. But what constitutes the human itself? The prehistoric paintings at Chauvet confront us with a dimension of ourselves that, though familiar in ways, remains in many respects unknown and may ultimately be unknowable. Human consciousness has access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy. [This is]… the “imaginal,” the name Henry Corbin gave to the intermediate realm, central to the inscrutable mind of God. As a concrete manifestation of this imaginal realm in the public sphere, art calls us back to the source as a matter of course.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 182
Hudson Yards, NYC
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Maybe you know exactly what you dream of being. Or maybe you’re paralyzed because you have no idea what your passion is. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring, and dreams are not real. Just… DO. You think, “I wish I could travel” – you sell your crappy car and buy a ticket and go to Bangkok right now. I’m serious. You say, “I want to be a writer” – guess what? A writer is someone who writes every day. Start writing. Or: You don’t have a job? Get one. ANY JOB. Don’t sit at home waiting for the magical dream opportunity. Who are you? Prince William? No. Get a job. Work. Do until you can do something else.
Commencement address to Dartmouth College, Shonda Rhimes in Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person
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Q: There is a voyeuristic quality to your paintings in the “Domestic Threats” series. Perhaps it is because we are seeing objects most would consider inanimate acting out these complex scenes you’ve created for them. Where do the stories come from?
“He Didn’t Take Seriously the Threat From Below,” soft pastel on sandpaper
A: When I set up the figures to photograph, I make up stories about what is happening. Being an artist has lots of negatives, but one of the fun parts is that sometimes we get to act like big kids. Some of the stories come from movies, mythology, folk tales, or dreams. I read a lot and I love stories. I try to be open to all sorts of influences because you never know what will work its way in to enrich your art.
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 