Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 506
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Inspiration is allowed to do whatever it wants to, in fact, and it is never obliged to justify its motives to any of us. (As far as I’m concerned, we’re lucky that inspiration talks to us at all; it’s too much to ask that it also explain itself).
In the end, it’s all about violets trying to come to light.
Don’t fret about the irrationality and unpredictability of all this strangeness. Give in to it. Such is the bizarre, unearthly contract of creative living. There is no theft; there is no ownership; there is no tragedy; there is no problem. There is no time or space where inspiration comes from – and also no competition, no ego, no limitations. There is only the stubbornness of the idea itself, refusing to stop searching until it has found an equally stubborn collaborator. (Or multiple collaborators, as the case may be).
Work with that stubbornness.
Work with it as openly and trustingly and diligently as you can.
Work with all your heart, because – I promise – if you show up for your work day after day after day after day, you just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
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Pearls from artists* # 318
“Conundrum,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
*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 tend to see our “personal tastes” as positive personality traits, whereas they could just as well indicate limitations that we might overcome given the right opportunity, the appropriate context, and a little courage. Each person’s unique take on reality will no doubt favor certain aesthetic experiences over others, but it may be that the world is filled with potential aesthetic experiences that our “tastes” prevent us from having for no good reason.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 293
Studio with works in progress
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Works of art specify no immediate action or limited use. They are like gateways, where the visitor can enter the space of the painter, or the time of the poet, to experience whatever rich domain the artist has fashioned. But the visitor must come prepared: if he brings a vacant mind or deficient sensibility, he will see nothing. Adherent meaning is therefore largely a matter of conventional shared experience, which it is the artist’s privilege to rearrange and enrich under certain limitations.
George Kubler in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things
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Pearls from artists* # 157
Barbara’s studio
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Only passion gives us a powerful emotion, a supreme strength and the enduring energy to fulfill our duty. It provides a stimulus, giving us hope and courage as well as stamina. The strength, love and joy passion gives us have no limitations. They are what drive us to sacrifice everything in order to achieve that which our passion requires. Passion is like a bribe from the gods, its great enthusiasm enticing us to do a particular work and to enjoy that more than anything else, without thought of the sacrifices and consequences.
Samuel Adoquei in Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People
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Pearls from artists* # 113
Studio corner
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In Amsterdam I saw a striking still life painted by Rembrandt van Rijn suspended above a glass case that contained the same objects that he used as a model for the picture. The contrast between what felt like a drab collection of random objects in the case and the stunning luminescent painting that seemed imbued with nothing less than intense energy and life gave me pause and clarified something I had been thinking about. I had been thinking about the power of art to transform the frustrations and irritations of daily life into a realm of grace and to embody, through arrangement, composition, light, color and shade, nothing less than the secret elixir of life itself.
We encounter daily frustrations, irritations, and obstacles. Perhaps we feel hampered and limited by our hit-and-miss upbringing, our apparent limitations and our imperfect ongoing circumstances. And yet Rembrandt’s still life painting demonstrates that it is within our power to transform the random, the everyday, the frustrating and the prosaic into an arrangement instilled with grace and poetry. Is it the arrangement of these objects that lends such a spiritual quality to the painting? Is it the sensation of light captured upon canvas? How did Rembrandt transform the quotidian into an uplifting vision of life?
Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling
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Pearls from artists* # 83
West 29th Street studio
* 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 world can make no response to meet art. Praise can miss the point as much as a casual remark such as I heard last night: an impeccably turned-out gentleman bounding up the stairs to the gallery exclaimed over his shoulder, “And now to see the minimalist – or maximalist!” He had all the relish of a casually greedy person with a tasty tidbit in view; he was on his way to gulp down my life with as little consideration as he would an artichoke heart.
Do I wish, can I afford, in my own limitations, to continue to make work that has such a high psychic cost and stands in jeopardy of being so met? Do I have a choice? I do not know. Neither whether I can further endure, nor whether I can stop. The work is preemptory. My life has led me to an impasse.
Anne Truitt in Turn: The Journal of an Artist
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