Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 633
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.
… as he makes clear repeatedly throughout the text, there can be no such thing as a revolution in art. The “plastic process” as he [Mark Rothko] labels, it – the development of art – is inherently evolutionary. An artist can react against it, but there is no way to be outside it; it is the fabric with which he or she weaves. Technique, ways of seeing, representing, and balancing, are all in a common pool from which the artist draws.
Christopher Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko
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Pearls from artists* # 624
Machu Picchu (Peru), June 2016
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If we were speaking from the point of view of the historian, and if we desired to know as concretely as possible how those peoples of the past or present conceived of their world, we should have to turn to their philosophy to find how they thought about their world, and to their sciences to analyze the atomic factors that contributed to those thoughts, and to their applied arts for the understanding of how this notion appeared when necessarily vulgarized to the common denominator of intelligence. But we would have to turn to their art to understand how they “felt about their world,” to know how their notions of reality found expression in their sensual perception of the world. And we know, of course, how those expressions can differ by simply examining Christian art, which consciously discarded the reality of its predecessor, Greek Hellenistic art.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 622
In 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.
Divining meaning from a painting is not so simple that it can be codified in a book, and [Mark] Rothko certainly would not have wanted such a guide to his work. So much of understanding his work is personal, and so much of it is made up of the process of getting inside the work. It is like the “plastic journey” he describes in his “Plasticity” chapter – you must undertake a sensuous adventure within the world of the painting in order to know it at all. He cannot tell you what his paintings, or anyone else’s, is about. You have to experience them. Ultimately, if he could have expressed the truth – the essence of these works – he probably would not have bothered to paint them. As his works exemplify, writing and painting involve different kinds of knowing.
Christopher Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko
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Pearls from artists* # 620
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 painting lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 618
Lower Manhattan
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Today, instead of one voice, we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority – instead there is a score of would-be masters who would usurp their place. All are full of histories, statistics, proofs, demonstrations, facts, and quotations. First they read and exhort, and finally they resort to intimidation by threats and moral imprecations. Each pulls the artist this way and that, telling him what he must do if he is to fill his belly and save his soul.
Mark Rothko in The Artists’ Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 617
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists’ pigments, like printers’ inks, have many uses apart from the creation of art. The advertising artist, the illustrator, the portraitist, the stylist, and the decorator all employ the plastic and pictorial devices of the artist. Yet their chief preoccupation, the purpose and function of their effort, is other than the creation of art. It is the commercial artist’s job to enhance the desirability of marketable goods. The illustrator vies with the written word in the description of places or facts and the reporting of events. The portraitist must flatter his patron, while the stylist and decorator adorn his figure, streamline his gadgets, and embellish his property. There may be a resemblance to the outward appearance of art. But the intrinsic relationship is no closer here than that which exists between the composition of birthday greetings, recipes, or advertising copy and the creations of the poet, though the identical phrase and syntax may be used in both.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Q: Do you have any rituals that you do before beginning a day’s work in the studio?
The Studio!
A: When I arrive at the studio in the morning it’s rare for me to immediately start working. Usually I read something art-related – books written by artists, about creativity, etc. At the moment I’m reading The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko. As usual I am struggling to understand aspects of the art business and figure out what I need to do next to get my work seen and collected by a wider audience. The Artist’s Reality reminds me why I decided to make art in the first place. It helps reconnect with temporarily forgotten parts of myself and is a much-needed reminder of what I love about being an artist, especially in light of the business side that is becoming so complex and demanding of attention now.
Balancing the creative and business aspects of being an artist is a continual struggle. Both are so important. An artist needs an appreciative audience – very few artists devote their lives to art-making so that the work will remain in a closet – but I also believe this (from a note I wrote years ago and tacked to the studio wall): “Just make the work. None of the rest matters.”
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Pearls from artists* # 614
*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 artist has accepted his fate with open eyes, and I do not believe that he wishes any charity in relation to his self-assumed sacrifice. He wants nothing but the understanding and love of what he does. There can be no other rewards. The foregoing therefore is not in the spirit of asking for a charitable contribution, but rather the clearing of the way for what is really the motivating factor for this strange phenomenon: the creation of art.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 613
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.
A painting is a statement of the artist’s notions of reality in terms of plastic speech. In that sense the painter must be likened to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. For science is a statement of the laws that govern a specific phenomenon or category of matter or energy within the specified units and conditions of its operation. Philosophy, however, must combine all these specialized truths within a single system. It is because of this broad scope that Aristotle gives preeminence to the philosopher in the introduction to his Metaphysics, for he tells us that every man except the philosopher is an authority within his specific field, whereas the philosopher must have the acute knowledge that each man has in his own field plus the ability to relate all these fields to the operations of universality and eternity.
Therefore art, like philosophy, is of its own age; for the partial truths of each age differ from those of other ages, and the artist, like the philosopher, must constantly adjust eternity, as it were, to all the specifications of the moment. Art, too, creates at different times the notions of reality that the artist, as a man of the age, must inherit and develop and consider real along with the other intellectually conscious men of his time. His language, which is his plastic means, will also adjust itself to the possibility of making these notions manifest in their most coherent possibilities. The reality of the artist, therefore, reflects the understanding of his times, even as his creations shape those understandings. We posit this without wishing to attempt to untangle here the series of causes and effects, a process which would probably obscure more than it certified.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 612
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.
It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these external problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity of the means used to achieve them. And it is in the language of the philosopher and poet or, for that matter, of other arts which share the same objective that we must speak if we are to establish some verbal equivalent of the significance of art.
Let us not for a moment conceive that the language of one is interchangeable with that of the other: that one can duplicate the sense of a picture by the sense of words or sounds, or that one can translate the truth of words by means of pictorial delineations. Not all odes of Pindar, framed and embroidered, could duplicate the portrayal by Apelles’ brush of the Hero of the Palaestra. The Pandemonium of Milton or Dante’s Inferno can never replace the vision of the Last Judgment by either Michelangelo or Signorelli. No more so than the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven can be apprehended through the reading of idyllic poems, augmented by descriptions of woodland and fields, of torrents and streams, the study of ornithological sounds, and the laws of harmonics. Neither books on jurisprudence, nor costume plates, can possibly reconstruct Raphael’s School of Athens. And the man who knows a book or a picture through its critics, whatever his experience, has no experience of the art itself. The truth, the reality of each, is confined within its own boundaries and must be perceived in terms of the means generic to itself.
In speaking of art here, there is no thought of recreating the experience of the picture. If we compare one art to another, it is not with the intention of contrasting their actuality, but to speak rather of the motivations and properties such as are admissible to the world of verbal ideas. And if… we are partial to the philosopher – at the expense of those others who share with the artist his common objectives, it is not because we divine in his effort a greater sympathy to the artist, but because philosophy shares with art it’s preoccupation with ideas in the terms of logic.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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