Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 611
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.
This common participation in the Trinity of Line, Form, and Color has founded a promiscuous fellowship which, while promoting the respect for skill, promotes to a far greater degree the misunderstanding of art. For skill in itself is but a sleight of hand. In a work of art one does not measure its extent but counts himself happiest when he is unaware of its existence in the contemplation of the result. Among those who decorate our banks and hotels you will find many who can imitate the manner of any master, living or dead, far better than the master could imitate himself, but they have no more knowledge of his soul than they have knowledge of their own. We will know how little skill avails, how ineffective are its artifices in filling the lack of true artistic motivation. His “less is more,” is Robert Browning’s famous evaluation of this problem in comparing the imperfections of Raphael’s art to the impecability of Del Sarto’s, “I should rather say that it will be more difficult to improve the mind of the master who makes such mistakes than to repair the work he has spoilt,” Leonardo wrote. Neither Giotto nor Goya exhibited half the skill of Coreggio or Sargent, either in the complexity of their undertaking or the apparent virtuosity of execution. The artist must have the particular skill to achieve his particular ends. If he has more, we are fortunate not to know it, for the exhibition of excess would only mar his art. You may be sure that the artist whose method is muddled betrays less his technical inadequacy than the incoherence of his own intentions.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 574
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.
A creative life is risky business. To follow your own course, not patterned on parents, peers, or institutions, involves a delicate balance of tradition and personal freedom, a delicate balance of sticking to your guns and remaining open to change. While on some dimensions living a normal life, you are nevertheless a pioneer, breaking away from the molds and models that inhibit the heart’s desire, creating life as it goes. Being, acting, creating in the moment without props and supports, without security, can be supreme play, and it can also be frightening, the very opposite of play. Stepping into the unknown can lead to delight, poetry, invention, humor, lifetime friendships, self-realization, and occasionally a great creative breakthrough. Stepping into the unknown can also lead to failure, disappointment, rejection, sickness, or death.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* #571
The 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.
To put it simply, but accurately, artists are often lost to the world because of their obsessions with their art. They may be just as lost as they prepare to work or incubate a new idea as in those feverish days when they make their final cuts on a film or race toward a publishing deadline. They may obsess about artistic questions and feel bursts of creative energy day or night, alone or in the company of others, in the middle of the work week or on vacation in the Bahamas.
Lost in time and space, the artist may feel more connected to Picasso, Emily Dickinson, Ingmar Bergman, Gertrude Stein, Handel, or Tennessee Williams than to the people in his immediate world. The living past holds extraordinary meaning for him. He travels elsewhere, removing his spirit and attention from the present. He may reside, as he works on his novel, in the childhood of a character, walking the garden paths and living the household dramas there. He may come upon a Rembrandt drawing and find himself wrenched, not to any particular place or time, but just elsewhere, as he experiences the greatness of his traditions, measures himself anew, and dreams again of his future.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 555
Studio view showing some tools of the trade
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of material they used, the work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world maybe flapped at them
some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.
Annie Dillard in The Abundance, quoted in The Marginalian by Maria Popova, November 23, 2022
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Pearls from artists* # 546
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows
Not a trace can be found
You who are living, live the best life you can
Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory
Ai Weiwei quoting lines written by his father in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
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Pearls from artists* # 542
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Observing these objects and imagining their history broadened my perspective. In China, we were still living in a culturally impoverished era, but art had not abandoned us – its roots were deeply planted in the weathered soil. The stubborn survival of this indigenous artistic tradition demonstrated that our narrow-minded authoritarian state would never be able to remake our culture in its own image. From then on, when I wasn’t spending time with my parents, I was immersing myself in the world of antiques. The dealers found me perplexing, for I followed no prevailing tastes or conventional wisdom. Instead I was taken with obscure objects, and made a point of buying things that seemed to have little or no value; my hungry spirit was nourished as I imagined the stories lurking behind each piece. The observations and insights that came to me from the distant past spurred me on to make art of my own.
– Ai Weiwei in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
This is exactly my experience with the folk art I collect!
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Pearls from artists* # 530
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Samuel Coleridge described the imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” It achieves its fullest potential in artistic expression because it is there that it transcends mere representation to bring forth unprecedented images of the world.
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 517
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
You know. Don, I was reading a book on the life of Van Gogh today. and I had to pause and think of that wonderful and persistent force – the creative urge. The creative urge was in this man who found himself so at odds with the world he lived in, and in spite of all the adversity, frustrations, rejections, and so forth – beautiful and living art came forth abundantly… If only he could be here today. Truth is indestructible. It seems history shows (and it’s the same way today) that the innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression or what have you. Change is always so hard to accept. We also see that these innovators always seek to revitalize, extend and reconstruct the status quo in their given fields, wherever it is needed. Quite often they are the rejects, outcasts, sub-citizens, etc. of the very societies to which they bring so much sustenance. Often they are people who endure great personal tragedy in their lives. Whatever the case, whether accepted or rejected, rich or poor, they are forever guided by that great and eternal constant – the creative urge. Let us cherish it and give all praise to God.
John Coltrane in Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews
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Pearls from artists* # 510
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
This excerpt is from “The Blank Page,” published in Last Tales (1957). An old woman who earns her living by storytelling is speaking:
“With my grandmother,” she said, “I went through a hard school. ‘Be loyal to the story,’ the old woman would say to me, ‘Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.’ ‘Why must I be that, grandmother?’ I asked her. ‘Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?’ She cried. ‘And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.’
“Who then, she continues, “tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all – where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page.”
Isak Dinesen in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review
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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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