Blog Archives
Q: Does your work look different to you on days when you are sad, happy, etc.?
Barbara’s Studio
A: I am much more critical on days when I am sad so that the faults, imperfections, and things I wish I had done better stand out. Fortunately, all of my work is framed behind plexiglas so I can’t easily go back in to touch up perceived faults. I am reminded of the expression, “Always strive to improve, whenever possible. It is ALWAYS possible!” However, I’ve learned that re-working a painting is a bad idea. You are no longer deeply involved in making it and the zeitgeist has changed. The things you were concerned with are gone: some are forgotten, others are less urgent.
For most artists our work is autobiography. Art is personal. When I look at a completed pastel painting, I usually remember exactly what was happening in my life as I created it. Each piece is a snapshot – maybe a time capsule, if anyone could decode it – that reflects and records a particular moment. When I finally pronounce a piece finished and sign it, that’s it, THE END. It’s as good as I can make it at that point in time. I’ve incorporated everything I was thinking about, what I was reading, how I was feeling, what I valued, art exhibitions I visited, programs that I heard on the radio or watched on television, music that I listened to, what was going on in New York, in the country, and in the world.
It is still a mystery how this heady mix finds its way into the work. During the time that I spend on it, each particular painting teaches me everything it has to teach. A painting requires months of looking, reacting, correcting, searching, thinking, re-thinking, revising. Each choice is made for a reason and together these decisions dictate what the final piece looks like. On days when I’m sad I tend to forget that. On happier days I remember that the framed pastel paintings that you see have an inevitability to them. If all art is the result of one’s having gone through an experience to the end, as I believe it is, then the paintings could not, and should not, look any differently.
Comments are welcome.
Pearls from artists* # 628
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Down the rabbit hole of my research, I’d stumbled into an odd conundrum: Even though art experts can’t agree on what art is, a large number of them are convinced that making and experiencing art is an innate human impulse. It’s not a learned pastime we dreamt up once we got bored of staring at blank walls or figured out how to live past age twenty, but a biological predisposition that has helped our species survive. (One we may share with songbirds, parrots, whales, and other animals that have their own “aesthetic culture,” writes evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prom.) One survival-of-the-most-artistic hypothesis contends that art is our version of peacock feathers: An extravagant, frivolous display by which Paleolithic humans showed potential mates that they were fit enough to hunt and gather and have time left-over to paint warty pigs. Another theory is that our art-inclined ancestors survived, thrived, and reproduced because making art offered a dress rehearsal for grappling with hostile conditions. (Nine-thousand-year-old Libyan rock paintings of spear-wielding figures sprinting after horned beasts come to mind.) The scholar Ellen Dissanayake, who’s dabbled in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and art history, argues that art is a social glue that binds communities together and thus increases its members’ odds of survival. Also, she thinks the concept of “fine art” is a travesty that’s made us forget that “engaging with the arts is as universal, normal, and obvious in human behavior as sex or parenting.”
Bianca Bosker 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* # 628
Beginning
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We have nothing to go by, but still, we must begin. It requires chutzpah – the Yiddish word for that ineffable combination of courage and hubris – to put down one word, then another, perhaps even accumulate a couple of flimsy pages, so few that they don’t even firm the smallest of piles, and call it the beginning of a novel. Or memoir. Or story. Or anything, really rather than a couple of flimsy pages.
When I’m between books, I feel as if I will never have another story to tell. The last book has wiped me out, has taken everything from me, everything I understand and feel and know and remember, and … that’s it. There’s nothing left. A low-level depression sets in. The world hides its gifts from me. It has taken me years to realize that this feeling, the one of the well being empty, is as it should be. It means I’ve spent everything. And so I must begin again.
I wait.
I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was “not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life.” Colette’s words, along with those of a few others, have migrated from one of my notebooks to another for over twenty years now. It’s wisdom I need to remember – wisdom that is easy to forget.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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Pearls from artists* # 623
The 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.
Jealousy? Hmmm. Jealousy links up with competition. It’s hard to compete, really compete, in the art world. That’s why award ceremonies are a little suspect. Athletes can compete. I don’t know how much you can really compete as an artist. You can compete with yourself.
You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio you are after something that does not yet exist. Maybe it’s the same for a runner. I don’t know. But with running, or swimming, or gymnastics, or tennis, the achievement is measurable. Forget about competition. Rather, commit yourself to find out the true nature of your art. How does it really work; what’s the essence of it? Go for that thing that no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn’t come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing. It comes from concentration, and from your own ability to be fascinated endlessly with the story, the song, the jump, the color you are working with.
I know this sounds a little monkish or even sort of “holier than thou,” but I really do believe it. And that said, jealousy is a human sentiment. Few of us are above it. John Lahr, a writer, told me that the major emotion in Los Angeles is envy. I have to say he’s probably right. And a lot of it has to do with how close or far from an Academy Award one is. And LA, the capital of smoke and mirrors, would have sone believe that the award is just a step away. When you drive down Hollywood Boulevard, some of the dreamers look as though the dream ate them alive.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 511
* 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 do not need anyone’s permission to live a creative life.
Maybe you didn’t receive this kind of message when you were growing up. Maybe your parents were terrified of risk in any form. Maybe your parents were obsessive-compulsive rule-followers, or maybe they were too busy being melancholic depressives, or addicts, or abusers to ever use their imaginations towards creativity. Maybe they were afraid of what the neighbors would say. Maybe your parents weren’t makers in the least. Maybe they were pure consumers. Maybe you grew up in an environment where people just sat around watching tv and waiting for stuff to happen to them.
Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.
Look a little further back in your family’s history. Look at your grandparents: Odds are pretty good they were makers. No? Not yet? Keep looking back, then. Go back further still. Look at your great-grandparents. Look at your ancestors. Look at the ones who were immigrants, or slaves, or soldiers, or farmers, or sailors, or the original people who watched the ships arrive with the strangers onboard. Go back far enough and you will find people who were not consumers. People who were not passively waiting for stuff to happen to them. You will find people who spent their lives making things.
This is where you come from.
This is where we all come from.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 463
*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 in doubt, when you are lost, don’t stop. Instead, concentrate on detail. Look around, find a detail to concentrate on and do that. Forget the big picture for a while. Just put your energy into the details of what is already there. The big picture will eventually open up and reveal itself if you can stay out of the way for a while. It won’t open up if you stop. You have to stay involved but you don’t always have to stay involved with the big picture.
While paying attention to the details and welcoming insecurity, while walking the tightrope between control and chaos and using accidents, while allowing yourself to go off balance and going through the back door, while creating the circumstances in which something might happen and being ready for the leap, while not hiding and being ready to stop doing homework, something is bound to happen. And it will probably be appropriately embarrassing.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
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Pearls from artists* # 419
A corner of Barbara’s West Village apartment
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Dear Reader,
We wouldn’t need books quite so much if everyone around us understood us well. But they don’t. Even those who love us get us wrong They tell us who we are but leave things out. They claim to know what we need, but forget to ask us properly first. They can’t understand what we feel – and sometimes, we’re unable to tell them, because we don’t really understand it ourselves. That’s where books come in. They explain us to ourselves and to others, and make us feel less strange, less isolated and less alone. We might have lots of good friends, but even with the best friends in the world, there are things that no one quite gets. That’s the moment to turn to books. They are friends waiting for us any time we want them, and they will always speak honestly to us about what really matters. They are the perfect cure for loneliness. They can be our very closest friends.
Yours,
Alain
Alain de Botton in A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick
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Pearls from artists* # 288
Los Cabos, Mexico
*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 always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman
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Pearls from artists* # 134
“Bryan,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 22″ x 28″, 1988
* 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 never want to forget your roots. Going back to your roots is very important so you don’t get carried away from something essential. Otherwise, you move farther and farther away from the hands-on approach to making art. It is very important to go back to the beginnings at all times. You spiral back.
Conversations with Meredith Monk by Bonnie Marranca
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Q: Can you describe your entire body of work in six words or less?
In the studio, Photo: Britta Konau
A: Only if I forget what it took to get me to this point! I remember all too well the long periods of study, hard work, self-doubt, self-nurturing, disappointments, setbacks, risks, focus, drive, discipline, joy, detours, fallow periods, rejections, perseverance, etc. that have gone into sustaining an art career for nearly thirty years. There are no blueprints and few role models for a successful artist’s life. (Even the meaning of “success” as an artist is difficult to define). I invite others, who surely can be more objective, to attempt a summation of my entire body of work in a few words.
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 