Blog Archives
Q: You take 3-4 months to complete one artwork. How do you plan a series such as Bolivianos over a year’s timeline and over the years? (Question from Vedica Art Studios and Gallery)
A: Bolivianos is my third series, and like the previous two, it naturally evolves from one painting to the next. There wasn’t a long-term plan involved, and I doubt such detailed planning would even be practical. Many artists likely work this way—finishing one project and then beginning another. As with Bolivianos, I typically have ideas for the next two or three paintings, but little concept beyond that.
The main impetus for Bolivianos was to continue work I began in the early 1990s. During a visit to La Paz, I captured a series of stunning photographs, inspiring me to translate them into a major pastel series. Each painting leads to ideas about the next, guiding the entire series’ evolution and shaping my understanding of its meaning. Both the series and my insights deepen as I engage further with the subject matter. The Bolivian Carnival masks I photographed provided the starting point for a long and continuing intellectual journey.
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Pearls from artists* # 370
Barbara at work on “The Orator.” Photo: Maria Cox
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Nothing determines your creative life more than doing it. This is so obvious and fundamental, yet how much energy is wasted on speculation, worry, and doubt without the relief of action. “Success is 90 percent just showing up.” I can’t tell you the number of problems that are solved with this one simple principle, because when you start, it leads to something, anything. And when you have something tangible in front of you, then you can react to it and amend it. And that will lead to something else. In the book, In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr., which looked at companies in America that excelled at what they did, one of the guiding principles was, “Do it, mend it, fix it.”
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 355
“The Champ,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
True art provides us with truth in a manner analogous to science. Its prophetic dimension – its knack for showing us the side of things that our interests blind us to – make it a source of knowledge, even though it is knowledge of a kind that instrumental reason has little time for. The psychologists who revolutionized our understanding of human psychology in the earliest twentieth century drew on two principal sources to build their concepts: the dream life of their patients and the great art of the past. Without this recognition of the primacy of imagination, Freud and Jung could never have drawn their maps of the psyche. Those who work for a better world would do well to follow their example and find the guiding patterns of life in the prophetic artistic works of the past and present. Only art can act as a counter-weight to that uniquely modern mentality that, wherever it becomes the only game in town, seeks to persuade us that the proper goal of human beings is to contain, dissect, and control everything – that even the most persistent mysteries are just problems to be solved.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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