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Pearls from artists* # 676
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.
Henry James once said, ‘The great thing […] the sense of having done the best […] the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, is having drawn from his own instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t […]. and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 636
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Some artists will rework a piece for half a lifetime before they know it is finished. An improviser may have to practice for years before being able to play a totally spontaneous minute of music in which every detail is right for its own fleeting moment. The great scientists and scholars are not those who publish or perish at any cost, but rather those who are willing to wait until the pieces of the puzzle come together in nature’s own design. The fruits of improvising, composing, writing, inventing, and discovering may flower spontaneously, but they arise from soil that we have prepared, fertilized, and tended in the faith that they will ripen in nature’s own time.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 623
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.
Jealousy? Hmmm. Jealousy links up with competition. It’s hard to compete, really compete, in the art world. That’s why award ceremonies are a little suspect. Athletes can compete. I don’t know how much you can really compete as an artist. You can compete with yourself.
You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio you are after something that does not yet exist. Maybe it’s the same for a runner. I don’t know. But with running, or swimming, or gymnastics, or tennis, the achievement is measurable. Forget about competition. Rather, commit yourself to find out the true nature of your art. How does it really work; what’s the essence of it? Go for that thing that no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn’t come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing. It comes from concentration, and from your own ability to be fascinated endlessly with the story, the song, the jump, the color you are working with.
I know this sounds a little monkish or even sort of “holier than thou,” but I really do believe it. And that said, jealousy is a human sentiment. Few of us are above it. John Lahr, a writer, told me that the major emotion in Los Angeles is envy. I have to say he’s probably right. And a lot of it has to do with how close or far from an Academy Award one is. And LA, the capital of smoke and mirrors, would have sone believe that the award is just a step away. When you drive down Hollywood Boulevard, some of the dreamers look as though the dream ate them alive.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 621
Montpelier, VT
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Irving Sandler in Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh
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Pearls from artists* # 605
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious – at least metaphorically – take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought forms.
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.
Carl Jung in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by RFC Hull
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Pearls from artists* # 583
In the Studio Photo: Susan Erlichman
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Let’s return to Michelangelo’s idea of removing apparent surfaces to reveal or liberate the statue that has been buried in the stone since the beginning of time. Michelangelo claimed that he was guided by a faculty he called intelleto. Intelleto is intelligence, not of the merely rational kind, but visionary intelligence, a deep seeing of the underlying pattern beneath appearances. Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surfaces from the Self, revealing his original nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 577
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.
What is the popular conception of the artist? Gather a thousand descriptions and the resulting composite is the portrait of a moron: he is held to be childish, irresponsible, and ignorant or stupid in everyday affairs.
The picture does not necessarily involve censure or unkindness. These definitions are attributed to the artist’s preoccupation with his particular kind of fantasy and to the unworldly nature of the fantastic itself. The bantering tolerance granted to the absentminded professor is extended to the artist. Biographers contrast the artless news of his judgments with the high attainment of his art, and while his naïveté or rascality are gossiped about, they are viewed as signs of Simplicity and Inspiration, which are the Handmaidens of Art. And if the artist is inarticulate and lacking in the usual repositories of fact and information, how fortunate, it is said, that nature has contrived to divert him from all worldly distractions so he may be single-minded in regards to his special office.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, edited and with an introduction by Christopher Rothko
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Pearls from artists* # 569
With Jennifer and Dmitri after our film shoot in Alexandria, VA
*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 consider themselves to be independent people. But the artist’s independent, rebellious, nonconforming nature, coupled with his introspective habits of mind, also make him wary of social interactions. Whereas the fireman, for example, has no reason to believe keeping company with other firemen will diminish his ability to fight fires, the artist, keenly aware that his journey is a personal and independent one, often fears that contact with his peers will slow him down, detour him, limit him, or unduly influence him.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 465
*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 his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn proposed that if art has never been revealed its intrinsic “function” to us, it is because such a thing is beyond our ken. For the Russian writer, we are mistaken when we call art a human innovation; we ought instead to see it as a gift, something that came to us from beyond the bounds of our world. Solzhenitsyn illustrates his point by comparing the work of art to the technological marvel that a man from the proverbial Stone Age comes across in the wilderness. Unable to penetrate its secrets, the man can only turn the object this way and that, looking for “some arbitrary use to which he can put it, without suspecting an extraordinary one.” Solzhenitsyn goes on:
“So also we, holding art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters, boldly we direct it, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement… and at another… for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives us a part of its secret inner light.”
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 458
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When I have painted a fine picture I have not given expression to a thought! That is what they say. What fools people are! They would strip painting of all its advantages. A writer has to say almost everything in order to make himself understood, but in painting it is as if some mysterious bridge were set up between the spirit of the persons in the picture and the beholder. The beholder sees figures, the external appearance of nature, but inwardly he meditates; the true thinking that is common to all men. Some give substance to it in writing, but in so doing they lose the subtle essence. Hence, grosser minds are more easily moved by writers than by painters or musicians. The art of the painter is all the nearer to man’s heart because it seems to be more material. In painting, as in external nature, proper justice is done to what is finite and to what is infinite, in other words, to what the soul finds inwardly moving in objects that are known through the senses alone.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
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