Blog Archives
Q: How do you persist despite the haters, nay-sayers, etc.? (Question from Bold Journey Publishing)
Barbara’s Studio
A: There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? For artists I believe it’s all about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts, and a deep love of our hard-fought creative process.
I have been a full-time professional artist for 37 years. How and why do successful artists persist? It helps a lot to be stubborn! We just keep digging in that much deeper. Making art is a most noble and sacred calling – you know this if you are one of the called – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we artists who continue to struggle every day for recognition of our gifts are true heroes!
These words below by Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women, published in 2017, ring true for artists. It’s good, even for me, to occasionally reread them and be reminded.
The obstacles faced by women who hoped to leave a mark on humankind have, through the millennium, varied in height but not in stubborn persistence. And yet, a great many women have stubbornly ignored them. The desire to put words on a page or marks on a canvas was greater than the accrued social forces that told them they had no right to do so, that they were excluded by their gender from that priestly class called artist. The reason, according to Western tradition, was as old as creation itself: For many, God was the original artist and society had assigned its creator a gender – He. The woman who dared to declare herself an artist in defiance of centuries of such unwavering belief required monstrous strength, to fight not for equal recognition and reward but for something at once more basic and vital: her very life. Her art was her life. Without it, she was nothing. Having no faith that society would broaden its views on artists by dethroning men and accommodating women, in 1928 [Virginia] Woolf offered her fellow writers and painters a formula for survival that allowed them to create, if not with acceptance, then at least unimpeded. A woman artist, she said, needed but two possessions: “money and a room of her own.”
Furthermore, I think I persist because I do not believe in “big breaks.” Big breaks may sometimes happen, but in my experience an artist’s life is made up of single-minded dedication, persistence, hard work, and lots of small breaks. I recently finished reading “Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never stop Learning” by Leslie Odom, Jr. I like what he has to say to artists here:
The biggest break is the one you give yourself by choosing to believe in your wisdom, in what you love, and in the gifts you have to offer the waiting world.
Comments are welcome!
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
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 598
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
For art to appear, we have to disappear. This may sound strange, but in fact it is a common appearance. The elementary case, for most people, is when our eye or ear is “caught” by something: a tree, a rock, a cloud, a beautiful person, a baby’s gurgling, spatters of sunlight reflected off some wet mud in the forest, the sound of a guitar wafting unexpectedly out of a window. Mind and sense are arrested for a moment, fully in the experience. Nothing else exists. When we “disappear” in this way, everything around us becomes a surprise, new and fresh. Self and environment unite. Attention and intention fuse. We see things just as we and they are, yet we are able to guide and direct them to be one just the way we want them. This lively and vigorous state of mind is the most favorable to the germination of original work of any kind. It has its roots in child’s play, and its ultimate flowering in full-blown artistic creativity.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 579
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.
An empirical fact about our lives is that we do not and cannot know what will happen a day or a moment in advance. The unexpected awaits us at every turn and every breath. The future is a vast perpetually regenerated mystery and the more we live and know, the greater the mystery. When we drop the blinders of our preconceptions, we are virtually propelled by every circumstance into the present time and the present mind: the moment, the whole moment, and nothing but the moment. This is a state of mind taught and strengthened by improvisation, a state of mind in which the here and now is not some trendy idea but a matter of life and death, upon which we can learn to reliably depend. We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in general motion and a perpetual invitation to create.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Q: Many of the world’s cultures have a mask tradition. Is there something special about Bolivian masks that first attracted you to them?
Bolivian Carnival Mask
A: My subject matter emerges directly from my travels. I visited Bolivia in 2017. What I especially liked then – and now – about Bolivian Carnival masks, is that they include additional textures – feathers, fur, costume jewelry, sequins, fabric, etc. that add to their physical presence. Masks from most of the other countries I’ve visited tend to be made of wood and/or paper mache and nothing else. In my view such masks are not as dramatic nor do they offer much expressive potential. They feel dead. They lack a certain “soulfulness.”
Furthermore, textures are challenging to render in soft pastel. For more than three decades I have been striving to improve my pastel techniques. By now I have a vast repertoire from which to select. As was true in my earlier series, with “Bolivianos” an important personal goal is to keep adding to the repertoire.
It takes months to create a pastel painting, which means I need masks that will hold my attention every day over the course of three or four months. I never want to be bored in the studio. If I am bored while making the work, those feelings will be directly transferred and I will make a boring pastel painting, something I hope never to do! The masks need to have a really strong ‘presence.’ Then as I slowly make a pastel painting, one that is exciting to work on from start to finish, I can transform my subject into something surprising and powerful that has never existed before!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 519
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Because the arts are the products of a process that stands apart from so much of our social, economic, and political life, they move us and excite us unlike anything else in our lives. When we rush to label them – as radical, conservative, liberal, gay,straight, feminist, Black, or white – we may describe a part of what they are, but we’ve failed to account for their freestanding value. And without that the arts are nothing. The artist in the act of creation – working through particular words, sounds, colors, shapes, and their infinite combinations – almost inevitably risks irrelevance. But the decision to reject doing in favor of making, which some have described as a retreat into self-absorption and narcissism, is in fact an act of courage. Artists reenter the world by sending the work that they’ve made back into the world, where it lives on – independent, inviolable – in what Auden called ”the valley of its making.” That is a place apart – paradoxically, triumphantly apart.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Pearls from artists* # 509
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Which left me with nothing but a dazzled heart and the sense that I live in a most remarkable world, thick with mysteries. It all called to mind the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s memorable explanation of how the universe works: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.“
But the best part is: I don’t need to know what.
I don’t demand a translation of the unknown. I don’t need to understand what it all means, or where ideas are originally conceived, or why creativity plays out as unpredictably as it does. I don’t need to know why we are sometimes able to converse freely with inspiration, when at other times we labor hard in solitude and come up with nothing. I don’t need to know why an idea visited you today and not me. Or why it visited us both. Or why it abandoned us both.
None of us can know such things, for these are among the great enigmas.
All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
It’s a strange line of work, admittedly.
I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 490
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Wherever apathy reigns supreme, the “strong” are those who can boast that nothing affects them. Numbness and dumbness become positive qualities, and any passionate engagement with life becomes a cause for embarrassment. How many hipsters out there consider passionate commitment of any kind to be a sign that one has been duped? Fortunately this attitude can only go so far, because everything in actual experience suggests to the contrary that passion and sensibility are necessary for anything meaningful to happen to anyone. They are the vital signs that make the difference between an existence that is truly lived out and one that is merely observed from a stifling security of a castellated self that falsely imagines that it can remain detached from the rest of the universe.
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 476
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
For a great many artists solitude is the time when they feel most real and alive. It is when they have their most intense experiences, when they can vicariously live out any adventure, any dream. Tennessee Williams said, “I’m only really alive when I’m writing.” The painter Robert Motherwell wrote, “I feel most real to myself in the studio.” The young, exuberant Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff exclaimed at the end of the last century:
In the studio all distinctions disappear. One has neither name nor family; one is no longer the daughter of one’s mother, one is oneself and individual, and one has before one art, and nothing else. One feels so happy, so free, so proud!
We may think of his aliveness as the accumulation of al the above-listed benefits, as the artist working out her life, manifesting her creativity, suiting her personality, playing, avoiding unwanted social interactions, working authentically and integrity, living intensely – as the artist being her grandest self.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 475
*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 order to warm the artist’s heart, it’s necessary to assert that he is doing good work. Random or wrong-headed praise won’t do the trick, but will only exacerbate the artist’s feeling that he is unseen and misunderstood.
Even wrong-headed praise is the exception rather than the rule in the artist’s search for recognition. More often than not your recognition will consist of criticism, not praise. You may be criticized for not attempting work you have no desire to attempt, for pandering to mass taste, for working too exotically or too narrowly… You may be attacked in a mixed review that purports to praise you. In short, you may be criticized for everything and anything under the sun.
Can you escape this criticism as you struggle for recognition? No. The journalist Elbert Hubbard said, “To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” … you can’t escape criticism, you can’t tame your critics.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and performing Artists
Comments are welcome!
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