Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 466
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Within the initial artistic response to something is a core idea or feeling and most of our work comes from stripping away everything that is extraneous to it. To translate that vision means “to get across” the idea or feeling. How cleanly can that idea be isolated and honed, how much can be stripped away? Everything superfluous and tangential needs to be eliminated. Otherwise the idea may get buried and our intention deflected. And the viewer’s will also. The problem is seldom that an idea is too simple. Power comes from something deeply felt and simply stated. “Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.” (Quote from Ken Weber, The Eye of the Spirit, Shambala, 1998, p. 136).
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
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
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 