Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 164
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24,” edition of 5
* 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 Eastern and Western classics are full of gods, saints, and heroes, all striving against life’s odds and overcoming them with perseverance, courage, energy and hope as well as help from some sort of divine energy. Unlike the gods, the saints, gurus, and heroes are humanized in creative works. Otherwise, we would find it difficult to accept them, relate to them or look up to them for inspiration and courage. It is the humanization of the subject that makes the supernatural sometimes feel real. And sometimes makes the impossible seem reachable and achievable. The classic writings all contain humanized heroes, saints and gods. The characters in these books are so humanized that the courage and inspiration we get from their endurance in overcoming life’s challenges will keep on inspiring readers forever. Because of this we can aspire to their accomplishments. If we too are able to create meaningful works providing timeless inspiration to help others, our work will live on.
Samuel Odoquei in Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People
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Pearls from artists* # 118
Monet’s garden
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
MONET’S “WATERLILIES” (for Bill and Sonja)
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980) in Art and Artists: Poems
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Pearls from artists* # 29
“He Just Stood There Grinning,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* 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 all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from our solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged with the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end, the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.
Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space
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