Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 681

Giverny by DH, 2023, in David Hockney 25, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If you want to lose faith in the concept of “good” art, just consider all the artists who were brushed aside as feckless losers in their own day – El Greco, Van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne, the list goes on – only to get their own museum wings and their paintings plastered on tote bags today.
Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Friends Who Taught Me How to See
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 555

Studio view showing some tools of the trade
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of material they used, the work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world maybe flapped at them
some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.
Annie Dillard in The Abundance, quoted in The Marginalian by Maria Popova, November 23, 2022
Comments are welcome!