Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 690
“Showman,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
PC: And today, don’t you think a picture communicates primarily through its metiére? A mysterious transubstantiation takes place between the thing itself and the way in which our eye receives it. Or, more precisely, a painter’s metiére has life in it, as if it were still laden with the artist’s passion. You feel his pulse beating in it, his need to register the victory of his presence in physical space but outside the reach of time.
HM: Every painter with real talent has his own metiére, a way of laying on the paint with relish, with a certain voluptuous feel, which means that you could say that metiére of this or that painter is like velvet, or satin, or taffeta. As to manner… No one knows where this comes from. It’s magic. It’s not something you can learn. There are very rich paintings, like those of Cézanne, and others very lightly painted that have real density all the same: Velazquez, for example, with his Phillip IV. He uses a scumble for the landscape, which is very beautiful and solid with matiére—the scumble is so well proportioned that it combines with the background and harmonizes perfectly; the Rubens painting on wood in the Louvre, Portrait of Hélène Fourmont and Her Children, is painted mainly in colored oils, yet how deep and solid the colors seem!
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse and Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut
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Pearls from artists* # 53
“Art and Beer,” a roadside bar and sculpture garden in Baja del Sur, Mexico
* 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 do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to draw us in, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them , because books are produced by books more than by writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice – or maybe it’s that stories. books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order.
Ali Smith in Artful
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