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Q: How do you define success as an artist?
Self-portrait at an architect’s estate in Sri Lanka
A: This is another question that has many answers depending more or less on how things are progressing in the studio. I’d say that you are a successful artist if you are able to keep working and evolving, and are mostly living by your own rules, using your time as you see fit to become a better artist. This means navigating through all the ups and downs, the obstacles – and we know there are many – to art-making and finding joy and on-going discovery in your own particular creative process. The work is everything, as we always say, but hopefully, you have found an appreciative audience and do sell a piece of art now and then.
I know that I am more fortunate than many. Over time I’ve realized that money, i.e., sales, is one of the less important aspects of being an artist. The richness that being a professional artist brings to my life goes far beyond anything that can be acquired with cash!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 64
High Line, New York, NY
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
As soon as an artist has located the vital center of his activities, nothing will be more important than for him to remain within this center and never move further away from it (which is, of course, also the center of his nature, of his world) than the interior walls of his quietly and steadily expanding achievement. His place is not, never, not even for a moment, next to the beholder and critic (at least no longer in an environment where all that is visible becomes ambiguous and preliminary, an auxiliary construction and temporary scaffolding for something else). And one basically needs to be an acrobat to leap back safely and unharmed from this point of view into one’s inner center (the distances are too great and all the spots too destabilized to risk such an entirely inquisitive feat). Most artists today use up their strength in this back-and-forth, and in addition to wasting their energy they get terribly confused and lose a part of their essential innocence to the sin of having taken their work from the outside by surprise, to have tasted it, to have joined others in enjoying it!
Ulrich Baer, editor, The Wisdom of Rilke
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 60
East Hampton, NY
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
For an artist, it is a driven pursuit, whether we acknowledge this or not, that endless search for meaning. Each work we attempt poses the same questions. Perhaps this time I will see more clearly, understand something more. That is why I think that the attempt always feels so important, for the answers we encounter are only partial and not always clear. Yet at its very best, one work of art, whether produced by oneself or another, offers a sense of possibility that flames the mind and spirit, and in that moment we know this is a life worth pursuing, a struggle that offers the possibility of answers as well as meaning. Perhaps in the end, that which we seek lies within the quest itself, for there is no final knowing, only a continual unfolding and bringing together of what has been discovered.
Dianne Albin quoted in Eric Maisel’s The Van Gogh Blues
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 50
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The important thing is the intersection between intuition and discipline, because you have to be alert and at the same time invisible. The eye has to be alert and capture very quickly everything you have inside you – I don’t know how to explain it. What the eye sees is the synthesis of what you are or what you’ve learned to do, this is the language of photography…
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With
Comments are welcome!
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