Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 698
With “Overlord,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 70” x 50”
*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 you learn to trust your own voice, it is like stepping up to claim your rightful place in the universe. Remaining true to yourself as an artist is one of the most difficult things to do: temptations to compromise are everywhere. It is through standing in the fire that you build and maintain your core essence. You cease to be afraid of your largeness, your power. You begin to wield your audacity in service of a vision that is larger than yourself. In doing so, you empower others to do the same. Every day, that call to rise to your highest self comes for you, and you get to choose. You can step over the threshold to locate the voice that you know, deep in your gut, has been becoming you… for years, or even decades. ‘Here I am,’ it says. ‘You sought me out. You are finally ready. Let’s do this!’
– Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Q: You read books on Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers. How has philosophy and your personal experience shaped the latest series, Bolivianos? (Question from Vedica Art Studios and Gallery)
A: It’s difficult to pinpoint how philosophy specifically shaped my work because my curiosity spans so many subjects. Some critics have described me as a Renaissance woman, remarking on my wide-ranging and voracious reading. It’s true—I’m genuinely interested in practically everything!
In pursuit of making art, I have undertaken in-depth studies of numerous intriguing fields: drawing, color, composition, gross anatomy, art and art history, the art business, film history, photography, psychology, mythology, literature, philosophy, religion, music, jazz history, and archaeology—particularly ancient Mesoamerica (Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya) and South America (the Inca and their ancestors).
Since the early 1990s, my inspiration and subject matter have come primarily from international travel to remote parts of the globe, especially Mexico, Central America, and South America. Travel is by far the best education! By visiting distant destinations, I have developed a deep reverence for people and cultures around the world. People everywhere are connected by our shared humanity.
These travels, supplemented by extensive research at home, are essential parts of my creative process. Research can be solitary and demanding, but I truly enjoy it. I want to know as much as possible, and this curiosity generates ideas for new work, propelling me into unexplored creative realms.
Foreign travel always expands our ways of thinking. This rich mixture of creative influences continually evolves and finds its way into my pastel paintings. Working, learning, evolving, and growing—I am perpetually curious and can hardly imagine a better way to spend my time on Earth!
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Pearls from artists* # 684
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
I often think that we should invent another word altogether for what real artists are doing… outside of, and despite, the market, so we could divorce ourselves from what ‘Art’ has devolved into. I aspire to create a new and visionary paradigm far away from the old one. I wish all the art magazines and blogs would declare that there is no longer any money to be made or any fame to be had, so all the people who were in for the wrong reasons would simply go away.
I want artists everywhere to figure out how to tap into their own deep well, the unpredictable source inside that can keep their work fresh and alive. I hope they build confidence to consistently preserve their integrity and independence. I long for them to trust their own intuition, to keep them on their true path as their work evolves. Finally, I yearn for them to reject anything that gets in the way of actualizing their deepest voice, so they might step into that expansive space that the universe has intended for them since the day they appeared on this earth.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 629
Basquiat X Warhol Exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Photo: Christine Marchal
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… scientists are right there with artists in insisting art is fundamental to being human. Art is one of our oldest creations (humans invented paint long before the wheel), one of our earliest means of communication (we drew long, long, long before we could write), and one of our most universal urges (we all engage with art, whether preschoolers, Parisians, or Paleolithic cave dwellers). I began to notice that art – or what scientists dispassionately call “human-made two- or three-dimensional structures that remain unchanged: – was everywhere: hung over the register at the hardware store, spray-painted on a bakery window, cock-eyed in a dive-bar bathroom. As humans, we’ve filled our lives with art since practically forever. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia, where around 45,000 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testifies for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting a portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J.Z. Young. “They are as necessary as food or sex.”
Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
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Pearls from artists* # 621
Montpelier, VT
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Irving Sandler in Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh
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Pearls from artists* # 605
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious – at least metaphorically – take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought forms.
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.
Carl Jung in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by RFC Hull
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Pearls from artists* # 502
* 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 to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, then fear relaxes, too. I cordially invite fear to come along with me everywhere I go. I even have a welcoming speech prepared for fear, which I deliver right before embarking upon any new project or adventure.
It goes something like this.
“Dearest fear: Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand you will be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job to do in my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently, your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do something interesting – and may I say, you are superb at your job. So, by all means, keep doing your job, if you feel you must. But I will also be doing my job on this road trip, which is to work hard and stay focused. And Creativity will be doing its job, which is to remain stimulating and inspiring. There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way. I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, and so I will never exclude you from our activities, but still – your suggestions will never be followed. You’re allowed to have a seat, and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote. You’re not allowed to touch the road maps; you’re not allowed to suggest detours; you’re not allowed to fiddle with the temperature. Dude, you’re not even allowed to touch the radio. But above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”
Then we head off together – me and creativity and fear – side by side by side forever, advancing once more into the terrifying but marvelous terrain of unknown outcome.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
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Pearls from artists* 457
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In Italy on the Prixe de Rome, he [Phillip Guston] traveled, studied Piero and Tiepolo and drew everywhere. His marks bunched up in quavering confederations and eventually left their subject matter behind. The trouble with figurative art, he concluded, was that it “vanishes into recognition.” Remove the recognizable and you can begin to see the push and pull of impulse, recanting, and reconfiguration that constitute painting and, by extension, life itself.
Susan Tallman in Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone, The New York Review of Books, January 14, 2021
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Pearls from artists* # 15
Somewhere in Guatemala
* 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 first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish, and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: “You need an idea.” It’s not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it has stand out like April blizzards). You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however miniscule, is what turns the verb into a noun – paint into painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
… I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking, “Where do you find the air you breathe?” Ideas are all around you.
I hesitate to wax eloquent about the omnipresence of ideas and how everything we need to make something out of nothing – tell a story, design a building, hum a melody – already resides within us in our experience, memories, taste, judgment, critical demeanor, humanity, purpose, and humor. I hesitate because it is so blindingly obvious. If I’m going to be a cheerleader for the creative urge, let it be for something other than the oft-repeated notion that ideas are everywhere.
What people are really asking, I suppose, is not, “Where do you get your ideas?” but “How do you get them?”
To answer that, you first have to appreciate what an idea is.
Ideas take many forms. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Big ideas and little ideas.
A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ides and they improve one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them. It’s confining and restrictive. The line between good and bad ideas is very thin. A bad idea in the hands of the right person can easily be tweaked into a good idea.
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life: A Practical Guide
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