Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 680
“Sacrificial” (on the wall) and “Trickster” (on the floor)
*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 makes a work transcendent and powerful is a personal intensity, an ‘extra’ quality. Yet that intensity is exclusive to each artist: extra strangeness, subtlety, causticity, bravado, sensuality, rawness, grandiosity, succinctness, mystery, vulnerability, truth, etc. For an individual artist to infuse an object or an experience with their own ‘extra’ quality requires not only skill or ideas, but the profound benevolence of consistently delivering in spades.
It is this passion and genuine feeling, specific to each creator, that lives on in the art as a gift. It is wrapped up in the work, forever suspended in time. The artist says,
Here… everything I possessed in this moment is embodied in this object… All skills I have painstakingly learned, all of the knowledge I possess, the joy and pain I have felt and all the experiences I have lived. I spun these into the perfect, most sublime form, and packed it up, but for you to unwrap anytime you need sustenance. It will nourish, comfort, and surround you, because you have chosen it.
Each viewer selects which works of art speak to them… which embodied feelings, concepts, and knowledge they value. An empathic connection is forged through the art object or experience. What is love, but to say to someone, ‘you are truly seen and understood?’ Art offers this as well, by reaching out to puncture through the membrane of our emotional isolation, to articulate how we feel in the moments when we cannot find words. It tells the artist and viewer alike, ‘You are not alone. You are not alone in how your brain works. You are not alone in the pain you feel. You are not alone in what you notice or appreciate, or in how much love you have to give.’
Pour that love into an art object. It can handle all the devotion you pack into it, and more.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 462
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It seems contradictory to call an artist both shy and conceited, introverted and extraverted, empathic and self-centered, highly independent and hungry for community – until we realize that all of these qualities can be dynamically present in one and the same person.
Indeed, this dynamism regularly perplexes and buffets the artist. He may begin to consider himself crazy for longing to perform even though public performance frightens him, or neurotic for feeling competent at the piano but incompetent in the world. He may come to possess the vain hope that he can live quietly, like other people, his personality statically integrated in some fashion, and then feel like a failure when the contradictory forces at play in him prevent him from feeling relaxed even for a minute. Once he realizes, however, that this puzzling contradiction is his personality, he is better able to accept himslef and to understand his motives and actions.
Eric Maisel in “A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists”
Comments are welcome!
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