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Q: How do you see art as a way to document the history and the customs and cultures of people? (Question from “Arte Realizzata”)
A: Certainly, art from the past gives us clues about life in the past, but I believe it does more. It reveals our shared humanity.
In one of my favorite books, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A treatise, Critique, and Call to Action, JF Martel states that “… what the Modern west calls art is the direct result of a basic human drive, an inborn expressivity that is inextricably bound with creative imagination. It is less the product of culture than a process manifesting through the cultural sphere. One could go so far as to argue that art must exist in order for culture to emerge in the first place.”
The art that is left to us through history gives a glimpse of our shared humanity across time and across cultures. We get to see a forgotten part of ourselves, something reaching deeper into what it means to be human.
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Pearls from artists* # 406
With “Avenger,” 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.
If we really are due for a shift in consciousness, it is incumbent upon each of us to “be the change,” in Gandhi’s famous phrase. Nothing is written in the stars.
Art is a testament to this way of thinking, because every great work of art is made, not for an abstract audience, but for the lone percipient with whom it seeks to connect. The symbols that compose artistic works are not static objects but dynamic events. As such, they can only emerge within a field of awareness, that is, within the context of a life being lived. It is therefore by approaching the work of art as though it were intended specifically for you – as though the artist had fashioned it with you in mind every step of the way – that you can turn the aesthetic experience into an engine of change in your own life and in the lives of those around you.
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* # 405
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.
… art is an objective pursuit with the same claim to truth as science, albeit truth of a different order. At the very least the consistency and universality of aesthetic expression throughout history and around the globe suggest that the undertaking that finds its modern formulation in the concept of art is a distinct sphere of activity with its own ontology. My belief is that what the modern West calls art is the direct outcome of a basic human drive, an inborn expressivity that is inextricably bound with the creative imagination. It is less a product of culture than a natural process manifesting through the cultural sphere. One could go so far as to argue that art must exist in order for culture to emerge in the first place.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Q: How important are the titles of your pastel paintings?
“Provocateur,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
A: I’d say they are important. Titles serve mainly as “a way in” for viewers, giving some clues about my thought processes while I am making a painting. Usually titles emerge only after I have been working on a painting for weeks or months. For me they are very much like mementos after a very interesting journey.
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Q: How do you decide how much realism and how much imagination to put into a pastel painting?
Models, reference photograph, and pastel painting in progress
A: I wouldn’t say “decide” is the right word because creating a painting is not strictly the result of conscious decisions. I think of my reference photograph, my preliminary sketch, and the actual folk art objects I depict as starting points. Over the months that it takes to make a pastel painting, the resulting interpretive development pushes the painting far beyond this source material. When all goes well, the original material disappears and characters that belong to the painting and nowhere else emerge.
It is a mysterious process that I am still struggling to understand. This is the best way I can describe what it feels like from the inside, as the maker.
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Pearls from artists* # 121
Sri Lanka
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists, when they are absorbed in their work, are also deeply connected to other human beings. The theologian Matthew Fox said, “The journey the artist makes in turning inward to listen and to trust his or her images is a communal journey.” The psychologist Otto Rank argued that, “The collective unconscious, not rugged individuality, gives birth to creativity.”
To be sure, artists are not making real contact with real human beings as they work in the studio, but they are making contact in the realm of the spirit. The absence of the pressures real people bring to bear on them allows them, in solitude, to love humankind. Whereas in their day job they may hate their boss and at Thanksgiving they must deal with their alcoholic parents, in the studio their best impulses and most noble sentiments are free to emerge.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts
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barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
Pearls from artists* # 529
Oct 19
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
All sorts of novelists, composers, choreographers, poets, and painters find themselves engaged in the challenges of authority and freedom that are the lifeblood of the arts. Art is a way of life – and not only or even essentially for geniuses. An artistic community – to whatever degree it may be joined by social, economic, or other concerns – is fundamentally united by the imperatives of a vocation as they are shaped in a particular time. Genius doesn’t emerge ex nihilo. And it doesn’t have a unique relationship with authority and freedom. Whatever truth there is to Walter Benjamin’s comment, apropos of Proust’s novel, that certain masterpieces begin or end a genre, it’s usually true that every masterpiece reaffirms the fundamental character of a form. For every epochal achievement that we may see as an assertion of unexpected degrees of freedom (Beethoven’s final quartets or Shakespeare’s last plays), there are others that reaffirm the pressure of tradition (an example is Raphael’s neoclassical designs for tapestries representing scenes from the lives of Saint Peter and Saint Paul). For every creative spirit, the great as well as the merely good, there is a sense in which the wager is the same.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Posted in 2022, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Art Works in Progress, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Quotes
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