Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 559
“Sacrificial” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38” image, 70” x 50” framed
*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 are two images the spectator gets from every work of art: one while looking at the work, the other – the after-image – while remembering the work… the artist creates the after-image, the painter makes the painting.
Elaine de Kooning quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* # 409
Recent works in progress
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Poets can look at a painting and understand it without having it spelled out [and] painters can read poetry… People say, I don’t understand what it means, about John Ashbery’s poetry. Painters would never say that… The idea of “I don’t understand what it means,” looking at abstract painting and saying, “Explain it to me, what does it mean?” You don’t say that, and you don’t ask people to explain music. And so, poets, painters, composers don’t need explanations. Explanations are for other people… burdened by logic.
Elaine de Kooning quoted in Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 379
“Blind Faith,” 38″ x 58,” soft pastel on 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.
Elaine’s and Bill’s [de Kooning] relationship involved a continual exchange of ideas that wasn’t restricted to conversations with friends. In the quiet of their studio when they were finally alone, they’d climb into bed and Elaine would read to Bill. Faulkner was a favorite. She also read Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War tales. And she would read Kierkegaard. That nineteenth-century father of Existentialism wrote with great passion about the essential solitude and uncertainty of the human struggle. They were words of consolation for Bill and Elaine who, though confident in their paths as artists, could not have been free of the nagging fear that they might spend their lives looking and never find what they sought in their work. Kierkegaard seemed to say that it didn’t matter, that it was striving that counted, and he described the need to reconcile oneself to the unknowable that was man’s fate. The artist, he said, had a crucial role to play in that regard. Like a religious figure who was an envoy from a realm most people could not access, the artist through his or her work revealed pure spirit so that men mired in the bitter reality of daily life might find the strength to continue.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
Comments are welcome!
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