Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 453
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Art begins in the struggle for equilibrium. One cannot create from a balanced state. Being off balance produces a predicament that is always interesting on stage. In the moment of unbalance, our animal instincts prompt us to struggle towards equilibrium and this struggle is endlessly engaging and fruitful. When you welcome imbalance in your work, you will find yourself instantly face to face with your own inclination towards habit. Habit is an artist’s opponent. In art, the unconscious repetition of familiar territory is never vital or exciting. We must try to remain awake and alive in the face of our inclinations towards habit. Finding yourself off balance provides you with an invitation to disorientation and difficulty. It is not a comfortable prospect. You are suddenly out of your element and out of control. And it is here the adventure begins. When you welcome imbalance, you will instantly enter new and unchartered territory in which you feel small and inadequate in relation to the task at hand. But the fruits of this engagement abound.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
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Pearls from artists* # 390
In the studio. Photo: Izzy Nova
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What made their work so unique and brilliant was that intangible element – self. Great painting, great art in general, is not about materials used or methods mastered or even talent possessed. It is a combination of all of these factors, and an individual driven by a force that seems outside them, toward expression of an idea they often do not understand.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 363
Thar Desert, Rajasthan, 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.
Beauty seems to need quiet and take patience, both to create it and to experience it.
If our minds are filled with a long and urgent “to do” list, we are not likely to slow down enough to appreciate anything but the next line we can draw through our never-ending list. Yet every now and again something stops us. It arrests our constant external activity and search. We can be stopped by the way the light filters through the trees in our backyard or hits a bowl of fruit on our kitchen table. And we are silenced, even if momentarily. We can be stopped by cave paintings as easily as by a thirteenth-century tapestry or a fifteenth-century Italian painting. We may be impressed by the craft of the artist, but almost always what moves us most deeply is the beauty that is expressed by the craft.
In the face of beauty, we are silenced because beauty expresses silence. In lavishing attention on the object of the artwork, the consciousness of the artist can touch something divine, some transcendental quality, and that transcendent element now resides in the artwork. How do we know it? We feel it. We experience it. Our heart responds to that sublime quality the artist infused into the work.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Q: As an artist what would you say is your particular ‘superpower’?
Barbara’s studio
A: I have been told that it is my unique way of composing images or, in other words, how I deliberately move the viewer’s eye around the picture. More exactly, it’s the way I combine flat shapes, patterns, angles, forms, modeling, decoration, details, lights, and darks in surprising ways when I make pastel paintings or pick up a camera.
But I think there’s a secondary, more subtle element: my understanding of and sensitivity to using color for psychological effect. The way I use color in pastel paintings is intuitive. This is something I haven’t reflected on very much yet, but will examine in a future post.
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Q: What in your opinion marks a work of art as contemporary?
West 26th Street, NYC
A: “Contemporary art” is defined formally as art made since 1970 by living artists who are still making new work. People often confuse the term “contemporary art” with “modern art,” but they are not the same. “Modern art” refers to art made during the period between, roughly, the 1860’s to 1970.
Nowadays there are so many different kinds of art – new forms are developing all the time – and almost anything can be considered contemporary art as long as someone, an artist, says it is art. Ours is a fascinating, but bewildering, crazy, and often silly art world. Since I am based in New York, I see a lot that makes me ask, “Is this really art?” and “Why would anyone make such a thing?”
If there is one single element I look for in visual art it would have to be a high degree of craft. I enjoy seeing work that is beautiful, well-crafted, and that makes me wonder how the artist made it. With the exception of Ai Weiwei and Julie Mehretu (maybe others I can’t think of just now), I prefer art made by a single creator, as opposed to artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, who employ dozens of people to make their work.
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Pearls from artists* # 70
New York, NY
* 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 you like a photograph or not, it has a history behind it. When people look at a photograph, they want to believe in its authenticity, that they’re looking at something special that can’t be repeated. The artist’s eye, the photographer’s eye, has created a moment of truth by pushing the button on the camera. The issue is not that the moment is separate from the rest of the photograph; it is the element that links what’s happening to the rest of the image, and the photographer creates a higher meaning, a higher sensibility, in that instant. That’s difficult to achieve for most people who are involved in photography as artists. It’s an essential part of basic photography that’s learned on the street and in traditional ways that people used to do photography.
Roger Ballen in Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen
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Q: Your “Gods and Monsters” series consists of tableaux of Mexican and Guatemalan figures that are photographed in a way that blurs certain elements to abstraction while others are in clear focus. Can you please speak more about this work?
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24″, edition of 5
A: When I depict the Mexican and, more recently, Guatemalan figures in my pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, they are hard-edged, vibrant, and in-your-face. That’s a result of the way I work in pastel. I slowly and meticulously build up layers of pigment, blend them with my fingers, continually refine and try to find the best, most eye-popping colors. It’s a very slow process that takes months of hard work. An aside… One frustration I have as an artist – I am hardly unique in this – is that my audience only sees the finished piece and they look at it for perhaps ten seconds. They rarely think about how their ten-second experience took me months to create!
In 2002 when I began photographing these figures, I wanted to take the same subject matter and give it an entirely different treatment. So these images are deliberately soft focus, dreamy, and mysterious. I use a medium format camera and shoot film. I choose a narrow depth of field. I hold gels in front of the scene to blur it and to provide unexpected areas of color. Even as a photographer I am a colorist.
I want this work to surprise me and it does, since I don’t usually know what images I will get. Often I don’t even look through the viewfinder as I position the camera and the gels and click the shutter. I only know what I’ve shot after I’ve seen a contact sheet, usually the next day.
The “Gods and Monsters” series began entirely as a reaction to my pastel paintings. The latter are extremely meticulous and labor intensive. At a certain point in the process I know more or less what the finished painting will look like, but there are still weeks of slow, laborious detail work ahead. So my photographic work is spontaneous, serendipitous, and provides me with much-needed instant gratification. I find it endlessly intriguing to have two diametrically opposed ways of working with the same subject.
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