Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 599
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Leonora [Carrington] certainly became knowledgeable about Mexican muralism and in the early 1960s she would paint her own mural, el mundo mágico de Los mayas, but she was clear that this didn’t involve associating herself with the Mexican school [of muralists]. ‘I was not interested in a social message in painting and my mural was totally foreign to that discourse,’ she explained. Explanations were not something she gave often; she was always very clear that for her, elucidation was neither necessary nor possible, because she believed that art spoke to people in the deepest part of their psyche. She warned me not to try to rationalize or intellectualize it. The way to understand paintings, she said, was to tune in to one’s own feelings about a work: ‘You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make into a kind of mini-logic – you’ll never understand by that road.’
Joanna Moorhead in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 400
In the studio with friends
* 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 student in the audience raised her hand and asked me:
“Why should I live?”
… In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and the richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy – the ability to like , love, respect, help, and show kindness – and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.
Stephen Pinker in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Comments are welcome!
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