Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 658
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.
A civilized society needs not only doctors, lawyers, and teachers but also artists, craftspeople, and other creatives to make our earthly existence compelling, thoughtful, and vibrant. Most people work to buy a bigger house, a newer car, or better vacations for themselves and their families. Artists devote their lives to making our world a more beautiful, truthful, and equitable place for everyone. They put their labor in service of those they might never see, for rewards that are never guaranteed. To my mind, this is a magnanimous pursuit… and about as unselfish as you can get.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 623
*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 the time [the Renaissance], Bologna was unique in championing the professions of women. The home of Europe’s oldest university, which had supported female students since the thirteenth century, the city considered women artists as integral to its development. Praised by scholars, written about by biographers and adored by the locals, they were also supported by patrons of all social classes (from bankers to barbers), creating a varied culture of artistic patronage. (By contrast, in Florence and Naples, commissioning was reserved for select noble families.). Women were also encouraged to sign their work, as well as to paint self-portraits for the purpose of being known and, most importantly, remembered. No wonder scholars have recorded a staggering sixty-eight women artists working in the city between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
These notable exceptions remind us that women have always been perfectly capable of being artists. But while there could have been an abundance of women working at this time, in reality female artists were an absolute rarity, seen as ‘tokens’ rather than pioneers. (After de Rossi’s death [in 1530], no female sculptor is mentioned in the city’s records for 200 years.). And little knowledge remains of those working during the Renaissance period. Most of what we know has been passed down by male scholars and through legal documents, rarely from the women themselves.
Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men
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Pearls from artists* # 455
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with [someone], and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
… Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Anaïs Nin in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 3: 1939-1944
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Pearls from artists* # 404
“Broken,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″ image, 50″ x 70″ 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.
Before we can even think of ecological rescue, global disarmament, or economic reform, we must find a way back to what science fiction writers call our homeworld. The term encompasses more than the biosphere; it also includes our homes, our places of work, our communities, families, friends, and lovers. It includes our technologies and tools, the physical body, the sensible soul, and the unconscious psyche. We need a faith to restore our capacity to feel, to affect and be affected with the same passionate intensity as our forebears, whose powers of feeling astound us so in the records and art of the past. The death of affect, to borrow a phrase from JG Ballard, is the true catastrophe of our spectral age, our spiritual Hiroshima. It makes questions such as whether life’s riddles are answered at the Vatican, in Tibet, or by the Large Hadron Collider utterly meaningless, since it removes the ground we need to pose such questions in the first place. Neither religion nor science can give us back the ground. Only the imagination can. Only art can mend the rupture of the soul and the world, the body and the earth.
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* # 12
Grand Falls, AZ
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
People who set their sails into art tend to work very hard. They train themselves in school; they practice and they read and they think and they talk. But for most of them there seems to be a more or less conscious cutoff point. It can be a point in time: “I will work until I am twenty-one (twenty-five, thirty, or forty).” Or a point in effort: “I will work three hours a day (or eight or ten).” Or a point in pleasure: “I will work unless…” and here the “enemies of promise” harry the result. These are personal decisions, more or less of individual will. They depend on the scale of values according to which artists organize their lives. Artists have a modicum of control. Their development is open-ended. As the pressure of their work demands more and more of them. they can stretch to meet it. They can be open to themselves, and as brave as they can be to see who they are, what their work is teaching them. This is never easy. Every step forward is a clearing through a thicket of reluctance and habit and natural indolence. And all the while they are at the mercy of events. They may have a crippling accident, or may find themselves yanked into a lifelong responsibility such as the necessity to support themselves and their families. Or a war may wipe out the cultural context on which they depend. Even the most fortunate have to adjust the demands of a personal obsession to the demands of daily life.
Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist
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