Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 678
Along the Seine, Paris, France
*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 I was a bit weary, losing hope, I would go out and walk across Paris. Sometimes I would meet an art lover who would say a word to me, nothing binding for him, but all the same it would buck me up a bit. For example, he might say: “What are you up to? I’d love to see what you’ve done. I’ll come and see you on Thursday at eleven. I’d go home feeling like a new man; I’d tell my wife how enthusiastic I felt; but on Thursday at ten I’d get an express letter saying, “Dear friend, please excuse me, something has come up.” But that wouldn’t matter so much because I’d made a new start. The deal had fallen through, but it’d still helped because it had given me new momentum.
Chatting With Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut
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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* # 482
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Devils’ heads with daring and disturbing eyes, twisted horns, abundant grey hair and hooked noses hang on the blue walls of Antonio Viscarra’s house. Long benches covered with old, multi-colored cushions in Bolivian motifs surround the concrete floor of the small room. Several dozen of these hanging faces, which seem to watch in silence from the darkness, are ready to be used in festivals and traditional dances.
The maskmaker or “maestro” as he is called, lives [deceased now] in the area of Avenida Buenos Aires, far from the political and administrative center of the city of La Paz, but rather at the very center of the other La Paz (Chuquiago in the Aymara language) where many peasant immigrants have settled, and which for that reason, is the center of the city’s popular culture.
Viscarra is the oldest creator of masks in La Paz, and his work has helped to conserve, and at the same time to rejuvenate, the tradition of using masks in Bolivian dances. If economic progress and alienation have contributed to the excessive adornment of new masks with glass and other foreign materials, Viscarra, in an attempt to recover the distinctive, original forms, has gone back to the 100-year-old molds used by his grandfather. His work has been exhibited in Europe, in the United States and in South America, Most important, however, is that Viscarra is transmitting his knowledge to his children, ensuring that this form of authentic Bolivian culture will never die.
…Viscarra inherited the old mask molds from his grandfather and was told to take good care of them because some day he might need them. After keeping them carefully put away for 50 years, the maestro used them again for an exhibition of masks prepared in 1984, slowly recreating the original masks, beautiful in their simplicity, in their delicate craftsmanship and in their cultural value. In this way, the masks which emerged from the old molds are regaining their past prestige and importance.
Antonio Viscarra, The mask Maker by Wendy McFarren in Masks of the Bolivian Andes, Editorial Quipus and Banco Mercantil
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Pearls from artists* # 445
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
My good friend the writer Charles L. Mee, Jr helped me to recognize the relationship between art and the way societies are structured. He suggested that, as societies develop, it is the artists who articulate the necessary myths that embody our experience of life and provide parameters for ethics and values. Every so often the inherited myths lose their value because they become too small and confined to contain the complexities of the ever-transforming and expanding societies. In that moment new myths are needed to encompass who we are becoming. These new constructs do not eliminate anything already in the mix; rather, they include fresh influences and engender new formations. The new mythologies always include ideas, cultures and people formerly excluded from the previous mythologies. So, deduces Mee, the history of art is the history of inclusion.
I believe that the new mythologies will be created and articulated in art, in literature, painting and poetry. It is the artists who will create a livable future through their ability to articulate in the face of flux and change.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
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Pearls from artists* # 129
Chalcatzingo, 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.
A painter friend of mine once told me that he thought of sound as an usher for the here and now. When he was a small child, Adam suffered an illness that left him profoundly deaf for several months. His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he saw could be woven together with much greater freedom and originality than he’d ever known. The experience was powerful enough that it helped steer him toward his lifelong immersion in the visual arts. “Sound imposes a narrative on you,” he said, “and it’s always someone else’s narrative. My experience of silence was like being awake inside a dream I could direct.”
George Prochnik in In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
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Pearls from artists* # 71
New York street
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists are individuals willing to articulate in the face of flux and transformation. And the successful artist finds new shapes for our present ambiguities and uncertainties. The artist becomes the creator of the future through the violent act of articulation. I say violent because articulation is a forceful act. It demands an aggressiveness and an ability to enter into the fray and translate that experience into expression. In the articulation begins a new organization of the inherited landscape.
My good friend the writer Charles L. Mee, Jr. helped me to recognize the relationship between art and the way societies are structured. He suggested that, as societies develop, it is the artists who articulate the necessary myths that embody our experience of life and provide parameters for ethics and values. Every so often the inherited myths lose their value because they become too small and confined to contain the complexities of the ever-transforming and expanding societies. In that moment new myths are needed to encompass who we are becoming. These new constructs do not eliminate anything already in the mix; rather, they include fresh influences and engender new formations. The new mythologies always include ideas, cultures and people formerly excluded from the previous mythologies. So, deduces Mee, the history of art is the history of inclusion.
Ann Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
Comments are welcome!
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