Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 118
Monet’s garden
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
MONET’S “WATERLILIES” (for Bill and Sonja)
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980) in Art and Artists: Poems
Comments are welcome!
Q: When you left the Navy you worked on commission as a portrait artist. Why don’t you accept commissions now?
Barbara’s studio
A: As I have often said, I left the active duty Navy in 1989, but stayed in the Reserves. The Reserves provided a small part-time income and the only requirement was that I work one weekend a month and two weeks each year. Plus, I could retire after 13 more years and receive a pension. (In 2003 I retired from the Navy Reserve as a Commander). The rest of the time I was free to pursue my studio practice.
For a short time I made a living making commissioned photo-realist portraits in soft pastel on sandpaper. However, after a year I became very restless. I remember thinking, “I did not leave a boring job just to make boring art!” I lost interest in doing commissions because what I wanted to accomplish personally as an artist did not coincide with what portrait clients wanted. I finished my final portrait commission in 1990 and never looked back.
To this day I remain reluctant to accept a commission of any kind. So I am completely free to paint whatever I want, which is the only way to evolve as a serious, deeply committed artist.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 81
“Poker Face,” 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.
The creative process remains as baffling and unpredictable to me today as it did when I began my journey over forty years ago. On the one hand, it seems entirely logical – insight building on insight; figures from my past, the culture, and everyday life sparking scenes and images on canvas; and all of it – subject, narrative, theme – working together with gesture, form, light to capture deeply felt experience. But in real time the process is a blur, a state that precludes consciousness or any kind of rational thinking. When I’m working well, I’m lost in the moment, painting quickly and intuitively, reacting to forms on the canvas, allowing their meaning to reveal itself to me. In every painting I make I’m looking for some kind of revelation, something I didn’t see before. If it surprises me, hopefully it will surprise the viewer, too.
Eric Fischl and Michael Stone in Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas
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Pearls from artists* # 80
New York, NY
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting [“The Goldfinch,” 1654, by C. Fabritius] has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time – so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
Donna Tartt in The Goldfinch
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Pearls from artists* # 38
Morning sun at 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.
It’s one thing to be intelligent and it’s another to enjoy thinking, to relish the time spent alone with one’s thoughts, to happily muse, imagine, and analyze. Artists, who are introspective by nature, typically enjoy spending time in this fashion and may even prefer solitude to the company of others. Able to work by themselves, artists are often lost in a state of dreamy thoughtfulness of the sort described by the painter Hans Hofmann when he wrote, ” The first red spot on a white canvas may at once suggest to me the meaning of ‘morning redness,’ and from there I dream further with my color.” Artists are not introspective, thoughtful, lost in time and space because they wish to ignore the world. They’re introspective because out of that attitude artistic answers flow.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 29
“He Just Stood There Grinning,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from our solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged with the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end, the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.
Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space
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