Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 597
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.
From earliest childhood, the boys had been treated differently from their sister. They were allowed more freedom, encouraged to play outdoors and to engage in rough and tumble, and their lives were expanded early on when, at the age of seven, each was sent to St. Mary’s, the prep school of Stonyhurst College. It seemed as if the boys were being readied for adventure and excitement, but while their horizons were opening up, Leonora [Carrington] felt hers were being closed down – or more specifically, never explored. Her role, which was clear even when she was in the nursery, was to keep safe: not to rock any boats, not to take any chances. What they sought to teach her was that she should sit a certain way and behave a certain way: she should be supportive, helpful, polite. She should listen, especially to men, she should have traditional skills, such as playing music and speaking French. Drawing and painting, for which she showed altitude from an early age, were fine within reason. What harm could there be in Prim [Lenora] creating pictures? Especially if those pictures were of flowers and trees, family members and characters from fairy stories.
But art was Leonora’s secret weapon – and she hid it in plain sight, because her parents did not have the faintest idea where her talents might lead. Art, for them, was unthreatening and pretty. They had no idea that this skill their daughter was developing would be one the key to another life entirely; still less that art could never be a validation of the status quo, but meant a radical reappraisal of everything in the artists sight.
So what Leonora practiced in the nursery at Crookhey was the subversive silence of smoldering rebellion. Spared by the inherent unfairness that gave Pat, Gerard, and Arthur so much freedom; stoked by the growing realization that she had a talent that would lead, eventually, to Liberty. “I always painted, and I always knew it was what I would do,” she said many years later. As the Jesuits who educated her brothers at Stonyhurst might have said (but didn’t): show me a girl aged seven, and I will show you the woman.
Joanna Moorhead in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
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Pearls from artists* # 523
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
How strange the human mind is! When I first began, I think I should have been willing to work at it from the top of a church steeple, whereas now, even to think of finishing requires a real effort. And all this, simply because I have been away from it for so long. It is the same with my picture and with everything else I do. There is always a thick crust to be broken before I can give my whole heart to anything; a stubborn piece of ground, as it were, that resists the attack of plough and hoe. But with a little perseverance the hardness suddenly gives and it becomes so rich in fruit and flowers that I am quite unable to gather them all.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
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Pearls from artists* # 441
*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 perennially popular category of art is the cheerful, pleasant, and pretty kind: meadows in spring, the shade of trees on hot summer days, pastoral landscapes, smiling children. This can be deeply troubling to people of taste and intelligence.
… The worries about prettiness are twofold. First, pretty pictures are alleged to feed sentimentality. Sentimentality is a symptom of insufficient engagement with complexity, by which one really means problems. The pretty picture seems to suggest that in order to make life nice, one merely has to brighten up the apartment with a depiction of some flowers. If we were to ask the picture what is wrong with the world, it might be taken as saying ‘You don’t have enough Japanese water gardens’ – a response that appears to ignore all the more urgent problems that confront humanity (primarily economic, but also moral, political, and sexual). The very innocence and simplicity of the picture seems to mitigate against any attempt to improve life as a whole. Secondly, there is the related fear that prettiness will numb us and leave us insufficiently critical and alert to the injustices surrounding us.
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong in Art as Therapy
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 168
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.
How strange the human mind is! When I first began, I think I should have been willing to work at it from the tops of a church steeple, whereas now, even to think of finishing requires a real effort. And all this, simply because I have been away from it for so long. It is the same with my picture and with everything else I do. There is always a thick crust to be broken before I can give my whole heart to anything; a stubborn piece of ground, as it were, that resists the attacks of plough and hoe. But with a little perseverance the hardness suddenly gives and it becomes so rich in fruit and flowers that I am quite unable to gather them all.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
Comments are welcome!
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