Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 680
“Sacrificial” (on the wall) and “Trickster” (on the floor)
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What makes a work transcendent and powerful is a personal intensity, an ‘extra’ quality. Yet that intensity is exclusive to each artist: extra strangeness, subtlety, causticity, bravado, sensuality, rawness, grandiosity, succinctness, mystery, vulnerability, truth, etc. For an individual artist to infuse an object or an experience with their own ‘extra’ quality requires not only skill or ideas, but the profound benevolence of consistently delivering in spades.
It is this passion and genuine feeling, specific to each creator, that lives on in the art as a gift. It is wrapped up in the work, forever suspended in time. The artist says,
Here… everything I possessed in this moment is embodied in this object… All skills I have painstakingly learned, all of the knowledge I possess, the joy and pain I have felt and all the experiences I have lived. I spun these into the perfect, most sublime form, and packed it up, but for you to unwrap anytime you need sustenance. It will nourish, comfort, and surround you, because you have chosen it.
Each viewer selects which works of art speak to them… which embodied feelings, concepts, and knowledge they value. An empathic connection is forged through the art object or experience. What is love, but to say to someone, ‘you are truly seen and understood?’ Art offers this as well, by reaching out to puncture through the membrane of our emotional isolation, to articulate how we feel in the moments when we cannot find words. It tells the artist and viewer alike, ‘You are not alone. You are not alone in how your brain works. You are not alone in the pain you feel. You are not alone in what you notice or appreciate, or in how much love you have to give.’
Pour that love into an art object. It can handle all the devotion you pack into it, and more.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 504
* 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 a project doesn’t work out, you can always think of it as having been a worthwhile and constructive experiment. You can resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame, and shame. You can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledge the truth that there’s plenty of room for everyone. You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failure. You can battle your demons (through therapy, recovery, prayer, or humility) instead of battling your gifts – in part by realizing that your demons were never the ones doing the work, anyhow. You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting – its partner – and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile. You can live a long life, moving and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
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