Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 665
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We are wordlessly persuaded and taught outright to hide so much of what we have unearthed in our lives. But artists throughout the centuries have described the power of using anguish as a catalyst to fuel their creativity. In Greek epic poetry, ‘Kleos’ refers to immortal renown. Unlike present-day fame, this term referred exclusively to heroes who had surmounted a great obstacle or persevered through tremendous difficulties. There is a certain authority that comes from those who have endured hardship. They have earned the depth of their work.
Darkness contains a great deal of energy. We can use it for destruction or creativity. Only those who tolerate it are able to illuminate the shadowy corners, revealing the nefariousness that hopes to stay hidden. We cannot change our past, or any hell that we have been through. But art provides the means to exorcise the pain that has taken up residence in our body and fashion it into a form outside ourselves, in an infinitely affirmative gesture. The darkness we have passed through was not endured in vain if we mold it into a vision that lights the way out… for us, and for all the other souls who undoubtedly need it.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 652
Dyke Marsh, 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.
And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold – but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy – and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual, that they may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing.
And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it and I can do what I want with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness to the wild and weedy dunes.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* # 625
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The artist not equipped with the necessary arrogance will be repeatedly sidetracked or subverted by the agendas of others. He will lack a sufficient sense of purpose, will frequently stall and block, and will bring a nagging passivity to his art career. His resolve to do great art may remain a potent idea only, a kind of unexplained force in his body. He is likely to accomplish much less than he otherwise might, support others rather than find support for himself, attempt the small rather than the large, and rebound less well from rejection.
The self-centered artist, on the other hand, is challenged to remember that he is neither god nor Superman, but a human being with human limitations. He hasn’t the time to turn every idea into a book, the ability to top each work with a greater one, the energy to toil ceaselessly at his art, nor the right to trample others as he pursues his goals. If he mistakes or oversteps these limits he will put himself in harm’s way and may find himself struck down by his own obsessional energy, by burnout, by depression, by self-abuse, or by the angry complaints of those whose rights he has cavalierly trampled.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 613
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.
A painting is a statement of the artist’s notions of reality in terms of plastic speech. In that sense the painter must be likened to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. For science is a statement of the laws that govern a specific phenomenon or category of matter or energy within the specified units and conditions of its operation. Philosophy, however, must combine all these specialized truths within a single system. It is because of this broad scope that Aristotle gives preeminence to the philosopher in the introduction to his Metaphysics, for he tells us that every man except the philosopher is an authority within his specific field, whereas the philosopher must have the acute knowledge that each man has in his own field plus the ability to relate all these fields to the operations of universality and eternity.
Therefore art, like philosophy, is of its own age; for the partial truths of each age differ from those of other ages, and the artist, like the philosopher, must constantly adjust eternity, as it were, to all the specifications of the moment. Art, too, creates at different times the notions of reality that the artist, as a man of the age, must inherit and develop and consider real along with the other intellectually conscious men of his time. His language, which is his plastic means, will also adjust itself to the possibility of making these notions manifest in their most coherent possibilities. The reality of the artist, therefore, reflects the understanding of his times, even as his creations shape those understandings. We posit this without wishing to attempt to untangle here the series of causes and effects, a process which would probably obscure more than it certified.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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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* #561
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The most powerful symbols draw profound reactions from us. The symbolic images in great art attract and fascinate us; they stir our souls and move us beyond what can be easily expressed; ‘their pregnant language cries out to us that they mean more than they say.’
The unconscious produces symbols as part of a natural process within us. These images emerge out of the context of our lived experience… Jung saw the meaning-making process as one that not only requires attendance to the real context of our lives and history, but also involves profound inner listening. It asks us to use our rational capacities, but also our feeling and imaginal ones.
Symbolic images redirect our psychic energy, bringing together conscious and unconscious material and producing the lessening of conflict. In this way, they activate a transcendent function within the psyche. We experience this as the discovery of personal meaning and healing. This transformation is not the result of formulaic operations, but rather is a dynamic process that requires our authentic and vulnerable participation. The process challenges the whole of who we are and requires deep moral effort. That the unconscious would produce moving, powerful compensatory symbols inside us at all points to a fact that our culture may not have fully grasped – that there is a force working within us which is always driving us towards healing growth and greater consciousness… Despite our suffering, the psyche is always ultimately seeking both a healthy homeostatic balance and our ever-unfolding growth and unique development.
Gary Bobroff in Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell
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Pearls from artists* # 507
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always – these are forces that fall within its [uncertainty and the unknown] grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the Knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come – for his adventures are all unknown. And no artist could go about his work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
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Pearls from artists* # 478
*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, because of the demands of their personality, their sense of personal mission, and their need to create or perform, are driven people. Mixed with the love of work can be a terrible pressure to work. For many artists, and especially for the most productive ones, the line between love and obsession and between love and compulsion blurs or disappears entirely. Are such artists free or are they slaves to their work?
In The Artist and Society the psychiatrist Lawrence Hatterer said of such an artist:
His most recognizable trait is his recurring daily preoccupation with translating artistic activity into accomplishment. The consuming intensity of this artistic pursuit brooks no interference or obstacles. His absorption with the creative act is such that he experiences continually what the average artist feels only infrequently when he reaches unusual levels of creative energy with accompanying output. He appears to be incapable of willful nonproductivity.
This is Picasso working for 72 hours straight. This is van Gogh turning out 200 finished paintings during his 444 days in Arles. The artist who is “incapable of willful nonproductivity” is a workaholic for whom little in life, apart from his artistic productivity and accomplishment, may have any meaning.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 463
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When in doubt, when you are lost, don’t stop. Instead, concentrate on detail. Look around, find a detail to concentrate on and do that. Forget the big picture for a while. Just put your energy into the details of what is already there. The big picture will eventually open up and reveal itself if you can stay out of the way for a while. It won’t open up if you stop. You have to stay involved but you don’t always have to stay involved with the big picture.
While paying attention to the details and welcoming insecurity, while walking the tightrope between control and chaos and using accidents, while allowing yourself to go off balance and going through the back door, while creating the circumstances in which something might happen and being ready for the leap, while not hiding and being ready to stop doing homework, something is bound to happen. And it will probably be appropriately embarrassing.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
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