Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 549
Departing from Paro Airport in Bhutan
*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 lot of times you take a trip halfway around the world. You think the trip is for one thing… and you came away with something else. You change in a way you did not expect. These are the lessons that come well after school, college, training, apprenticeships. These lessons are not full courses; they are two sentences long. I felt I had gotten a degree in two minutes.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts – For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
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Pearls from artists* # 520
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Ondaatje: Do you think success and failure can distort the lessons an artist is able to learn?
Murch: There’s that wonderful line of Rilke’s, “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.” Recognizing that all of our achievements are doomed, in one sense – the earth will be consumed by the sun in a billion years or so – but in another sense the purpose of our journey is to go farther each time. So you’re trying things out in every film you make, with the potential of failure. I think we’re always failing, in Rilke’s sense – we know there’s more potential that we haven’t realized. But because we’re trying, we develop more and more talent, or muscles, or strategies to improve, each time.
In The Conversation: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
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Q: What significance do the folk art figures that you collect during your travels have for you?
Barbara’s studio
A: I am drawn to each figure because it possesses a powerful presence that resonates with me. I am not sure exactly how or why, but I know each piece I collect has lessons to teach.
Who made this thing? How? Why? Where? When? I feel connected to each object’s creator and curiosity leads me to become a detective and an archaeologist to find out more about them and to figure out how to best use them in my work.
The best way I can describe it: after nearly three decades of seeking out, collecting, and using these folk art figures as symbols in my work, the entire process has become a rich personal journey towards gaining greater knowledge and wisdom.
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Q: What time of day do you find best for working?
Barbara’s studio
A: I have always been a morning person. When I was learning to fly at the age of twenty-five, I would be at the airport before 6 a.m. for flying lessons. When I was in the Navy, I needed to be at my Pentagon office by 7.
Mornings are still my most productive time. Generally, I wake up early and then head directly to work at my studio or to swim laps at a nearby pool. The windows in my studio face east so it gets lovely morning light.
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in pogress
A: I am working on a 38″ x 58″ pastel painting. Rather than create and photograph a new setup each time, I sometimes search through older photographs to find ones that might spark a compelling painting. Photos that I haven’t seen in a while often have new lessons to teach. The one clipped to my easel above is from 2009.
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Q: When was the last time you flew? Do you ever miss it?
Over the Gulf of Mexico
A: I last piloted a plane out of Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, some years after I moved to Alexandria, Virginia. It was in the mid-1990s.
Now and then I miss flying, but my interests have changed considerably and I am much more passionate about art than aviation. I still love physically being in the air – on an airliner, in a helicopter, etc. – and sometimes I dream about taking a few lessons to become reacquainted with flying small planes again, but I haven’t taken any action.
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Q: Would you talk about some of your early experiences with art?
Zebras in Chelsea
A: I grew up in a blue collar family in suburban New Jersey. My father was a television repairman for RCA. For awhile my mother worked as a sewing machine operator in a factory that made women’s undergarments, but mostly she stayed home to raise my sister and me (at the time I had only one sister, Denise; Michele was born much later). My parents were both first-generation Americans and in those days no one in my extended family had gone to college. I was a smart kid and showed some artistic talent in kindergarten or earlier. I have always been able to draw anything, as long as I can see it (i.e., I require a visual reference as opposed to drawing from memory). I remember copying the Sunday comics, which in those days appeared in all the newspapers. At the age of 6 my mother enrolled Denise and me in Saturday morning painting classes at the studio of an artist named Frances Hulmes in Rutherford, NJ. I continued the classes for about 8 years and became a fairly adept oil painter. Living just 12 miles from New York City in Clifton, New jersey, my mother often took us to museums, particularly the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History. I remember falling in love with Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” and being astonished by the violence and scale of Picasso’s “Guernica,” when it was on long-term loan to MoMA. I have fond memories of studying the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. They are still my favorite part of the museum. I suppose it goes without saying that there were not any artists in my family so I had no role models. At the age of 15 my father decided that art was not a serious pursuit – he said it was a hobby, not a profession – so he abruptly stopped paying for my Saturday morning lessons. With no financial or moral support to pursue art, I turned my attention to other interests (ex. I learned to fly airplanes, becoming a commercial pilot and Boeing 727 flight engineer) and let my artistic abilities lie dormant.
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Pearls from artists* # 11
Great Salt Lake
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Virtually all artists spend some of their time (and some artists spend all of their time) producing work that no one else much cares about. It just seems to come with the territory. But for some reason – self defense, perhaps – artists find it tempting to romanticize this lack of response, often by (heroically) picturing themselves peering deeply into the underlying nature of things long before anyone else has eyes to follow.
Romantic, but wrong. The sobering truth is that the disinterest of others hardly ever reflects a gulf in vision.In fact there’s generally no good reason why others should care about most of any one artist’s work. The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by over-painting the still wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about – and lots of it!
The rest is largely a matter of perseverance. Of course once you’re famous, collectors and academics will circle back in droves to claim credit for spotting evidence of genius in every early piece. But until your ship comes in, the only people who will really care about your work are those who care about you personally. Those close to you know that making the work is essential to your well being. They will always care about your work, if not because it is great, then because it is yours – and this is something to be genuinely thankful for. Yet however much they love you, it still remains as true for them as for the rest of the world: learning to make your work is not their problem.
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear
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Pearls from artists* # 4
At work on “False Friends”; photo by Diana Feit
Given a small kernel of reality and any measure of optimism, nebulous expectations whisper to you that the work will soar, that it will become easy, that it will make itself. And verily, now and then the sky opens and the work does make itself. Unreal expectations are easy to come by, both from emotional needs and from the hope or memory of periods of wonder. Unfortunately, expectations based on illusion lead almost always to disillusionment.
Conversely, expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool the artist possesses. What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love. Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work. There is no other such book, and it is yours alone. It functions this way for no one else. Your fingerprints are all over your work, and you alone know how you got there. Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, your habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace.
The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly – without judgment, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear
Comments are welcome.
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