Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 590
Barbara’s Studio: when you fall in love with pastel!
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We see again and again in the lives of special artists a profound youthful infatuation with their medium, with everything and anything connected with it – the good, the bad, the indifferent. If books have mesmerized them, they will read everything; if painting, they will frequent every gallery, running to every visiting show. They may have no idea that they are about to devote their life to that medium; they simply fell in love. The actor Len Cariou said:
“I didn’t have any thoughts about being an actor. I always was an actor. I’d go to films every Saturday. I had an insatiable appetite for films. You could see four films and a serial for half a buck. In 1959 when I read an ad in the local paper, ‘Young actors wanted for summer stock,’ all of a sudden I knew; there was a crunch in my head.”
… The artist is transported by his medium, is delighted and astonished. That his medium is able to speak to him in this way is almost a proof of the existence of god, or at least a special affirmation in the realm of the spirit.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 586
Starting a new one!
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego – and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude. No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. Isn’t this true for most of us? A surgeon about to perform a difficult operation is at the bottom of the mountain. A lawyer delivering a closing argument. An actor waiting in the wings. A teacher on the first day of school. Sometimes we may think that we’re in charge, or that we have things figured out. Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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Pearls from artists* # 362
On the Indian Ocean in Tanah Lot, Bali
* 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 we look at the artifacts of all cultures, beauty always has attracted man’s attention. We know when we are in its presence. We’re held. Different pieces of art will arrest different people, and… some pieces will arrest larger numbers of people for longer periods of time. These are the works that are perhaps worthy of being called great art. We have to recognize that some people today, observing the greatest works of art, or the most awesome works of nature – the Grand Canyon, for instance – give it a minute and then are ready for something else. Insatiable for change, they are immune to deep resonance.
Art and beauty are about those resonances. It isn’t the subject matter that holds us. Some inexplicable reaction stops us, and we find ourselves connected with something other than ourself. Perhaps our ‘Self’ might be a better term, to distinguish it from the self that is caught up in thoughts, worries, and distractions. I like Ken Weber’s definition, that beauty “suspends the desire to be elsewhere.” In the face of great art, we experience transcendence.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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