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Pearls from artists* # 387
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20”
* 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, you don’t go into the studio and say, “Oh, here I am this marvelous heroine, this wonderful woman doing my marvelous painting so all these marvelous women artists can come after me and do their marvelous painting.” There you are alone in this huge space and you are not conscious of the fact that you have breasts and a vagina. You are inside yourself, looking at a damned piece of rag on the wall that you are supposed to make a world out of. That is all you are conscious of. I simply cannot believe that a man feels differently… Inside yourself, you are looking at this terrifying unknown and trying to feel, to pull everything you can out of all your experience, to make something. I think a woman or a man creating feels very much the same way. I bring my experience, which is different from a man’s, yes, and I put it where I can. But once that is done, I don’t know if it is a woman’s experience I’m looking at.
Grace Hartigan quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* # 386
Barbara’s studio with recent 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.
[Art] is concerned with something that cannot be explained in words or literal description… Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition… Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content… The performance – how it is done – that is the content of art.
Joseph Albers quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* 381
Barbara’s studio with work 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.
A work of art, if it is art, is not an end but a beginning. It is a challenge to the artist who produced it and to the artists around him to take the next step, to answer the questions raised by the work, to achieve what he or she has yet to accomplish. It also represents a challenge to the non-artist, who is offered a fresh vision.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 380
“John,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 22” x 28” (image), 1989.
* 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 freedom he enjoyed came at a cost. But those fears and irritations evaporated amid the support the artists gave one another immediately after the war. A community developed that sustained them and gave them courage. “You have to have confidence amounting to arrogance, because particularly at the beginning, you’re making something that nobody asked you to make,” Elaine [de Kooning] said. “And you have to have total confidence in yourself, and in the necessity of what you’re doing.” That was much easier done in a group of like-minded individuals.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 379
“Blind Faith,” 38″ x 58,” soft pastel on sandpaper
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Elaine’s and Bill’s [de Kooning] relationship involved a continual exchange of ideas that wasn’t restricted to conversations with friends. In the quiet of their studio when they were finally alone, they’d climb into bed and Elaine would read to Bill. Faulkner was a favorite. She also read Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War tales. And she would read Kierkegaard. That nineteenth-century father of Existentialism wrote with great passion about the essential solitude and uncertainty of the human struggle. They were words of consolation for Bill and Elaine who, though confident in their paths as artists, could not have been free of the nagging fear that they might spend their lives looking and never find what they sought in their work. Kierkegaard seemed to say that it didn’t matter, that it was striving that counted, and he described the need to reconcile oneself to the unknowable that was man’s fate. The artist, he said, had a crucial role to play in that regard. Like a religious figure who was an envoy from a realm most people could not access, the artist through his or her work revealed pure spirit so that men mired in the bitter reality of daily life might find the strength to continue.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 378
With “Poseur,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 70” x 50,” 2019
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
[John] Graham told Lee [Krasner] and Jackson [Pollock] they were at the most wonderful part of their artistic journey because they were unknown and therefore free, and that there was only one thing they had to dread: fame.
How many men of great talent on their way to remarkable achievement in the present day are ruthlessly destroyed by critics, dealers, and public while mediocre, insensitive hacks, who by intrigue and industrious commercial effort have gained recognition and success, will go down in history with their inane creations. Success, fame, and greatness coincide very seldom. The great are not recognized during their life-time… Poe, Van Gogh,Rembrandt, Cezanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and others could not make even a miserable living out of their art.
As Graham described it, true art could never be of the world because it was always steps, decades, light-years ahead of it. Artists, therefore, had no need to be part of the world, either. Their only duty was to persevere. Humanity, he said, depended on it.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 377
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.
Life for an artist, any artist, was difficult. There were few rewards other than the most important, which was satisfying one’s need to create. But in the art world of galleries, collections, and museums that the avant-garde artists in New York would inherit in the late 1940s, the difficulties experienced by the men who painted and sculpted would be nothing compared to those of the women. Society might mock the men’s work and disparage them for being “bums,” but at least they were awarded the dignity of ridicule. Women had to fight with every fiber of their being not to be completely ignored. In a treatise on men and women in America published at the start of the war, author Pearl S. Buck wrote,
The talented woman… must have, besides their talent, an unusual energy which drives them… to exercise their own powers. Like talented men, they are single-minded creatures, and they can’t sink into idleness nor fritter away life and time, nor endure discontent. They possess that rarest gift, integrity of purpose… Such women sacrifice, without knowing they do, what many other women hold dear – amusement, society, play of one kind or another – to choose solitude and profound thinking and feeling, and at last final expression.
“To what end?” another woman might ask. To the end, perhaps… of art – art which has lifted us out of mental and spiritual savagery.”
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 374
Barbara’a 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.
Finally, [John] Graham said, of all the arts, painting was the most difficult because one false move on a canvas could mean the difference between a great painting and a failure. A writer could always resurrect a word, but a line or a shape was so ephemeral that, once changed, it was almost always lost for good. “To create life one has to love. To create a great work of art one has to love truth with the passion of a maniac. If society does not perceive this love, perhaps humanity will.” …The artists… came away… feeling as though they were not aberrations but part of a long tradition of individuals who had ignored fashion to create culture.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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