Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 82
“The Sovereign,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Art isn’t psychology. For one thing art deals in images, not language. Images precede language and are closer to feelings. They summon feelings before they’re named and categorized, when they’re still fresh and sometimes hard to recognize or identify.
For another thing, to translate his vision an artist uses materials that are, for lack of a better word, alchemical. Paint, for example, has this wonderful, mysterious quality – a smell and a sensuous, velvety feel and an ability to hold color and light – that unlocks and speeds up one’s creative metabolism. And paint captures my every impulse – from my broadest conceptions to the tiniest ticks and tremors of my wrist.
There are literally no words to describe what occurs when an image suddenly and unexpectedly appears on the canvas. Sometimes it’s serendipity, the result of a fortunate brushstroke. Sometimes I think it has to do with the inherent qualities of paint, or the slickness of a surface, or the fullness or acuity of a brush. And sometimes when I’ve got a good rhythm going and everything comes together, I feel as though it produces the purest expression of who I am and what I am and how I perceive the world.
Eric Fischl and Michael Stone in Bad Boy: My Life on and off the Canvas
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 46
Artist’s backyard
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Some things will naturally excite us more than others. This is where art begins, when we separate our inner-directed impulse from the outer-directed deluge of other people’s work and opinion. “The artists are the ones who bare themselves to this experience of essence… Their vocation is to communicate that experience to others. Not to communicate it is to surrender the vision to atrophy; the artist must paint, or write, or sculpt – else the vision withers away and he or she is less apt to have it again.”
The trick is to be able to learn to juggle at least two things at once. We need to keep the initial impulse in its entirety before us as we start engaging in the execution of the parts.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: Sixteen Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
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