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Pearls from artists* 381
* 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* # 209
* 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 young painter, life is difficult. If he’s sincere, if he’s entirely taken up with what he’s researching, he can’t do painting that flatters art lovers. If he’s concerned with success, he works with just the one idea: pleasing people and selling. He loses the support of his own conscience and is dependent on how others are feeling. He neglects his gifts and eventually loses them.
For us, the problem was simple: the buyer simply didn’t exist. We were working for ourselves. We were in a trade that offered no hope at all. So we had fun with any little thing. I suppose people shipwrecked on a desert island must find it very jolly – all their problems have ceased to exist. Nothing left to do but have a laugh, tell jokes, and play jokes. Painters? How could they ever expect to sell anything?
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut, translated by Chris Miller
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Q: How many studios have you had since you’ve been a professional artist?
A: I am on my third, and probably last, studio. I say ‘probably’ because I love my space and have no desire to move. Plus, it would be a tremendous amount of work to relocate, considering that I have been in my West 29th Street studio since 1997.
My very first studio, in the late 1980s, was the spare bedroom of my house in Alexandria, Virginia. I set up a studio there while I was on active duty in the Navy. When I resigned my commission, I was required to give the President an entire year’s advance notice. Towards the end of that year I remember calling in sick so I could stay home and make art.
In the early 1990s I rented a studio on the third floor of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria. For a while I enjoyed working there, but the constant interruptions – in an art center that is open to the public – became tiresome.
In 1997 I had the opportunity to move to New York. I desperately craved solitary hours to work in peace, without interruption, so at first I didn’t have a telephone. I still don’t have WiFi there because my studio is reserved strictly for creative work.
Moving from Virginia to New York in 1997 was relatively easy. My aunt, who planned to be in California to continue her Buddhist studies, offered me her rent-controlled sixth-floor walkup on West 13th Street. I looked at just one other studio before signing a sublease for my space at 208 West 29th Street. I had heard about the vacancy through a college friend of my husband, Bryan. Karen, the lease-holder, was relocating to northern California to work on “Star Wars” with George Lucas. After several years, she decided not to return to New York and I have been the lease-holder ever since.
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Pearls from artists # 429
Nov 18
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Vincent [van Gogh] found himself in perfect harmony with[Emile] Zola’s world view. Neither of them sugarcoated or idealized the harsh reality of the everyday life that surrounded them, or the subjects it offered up. The same reality was at the heart of both of their work. In July 1883, Vincent read Zola’s essay on art, ‘Le Moment artistique,’ contained in one of his critical works on literary and artistic life, Mes haines (My Hatreds), in which Zola reflected on a crucial aspect of artistic creativity, going beyond the word ‘realistic;’ ‘the word “realist” means nothing to me, and I declare reality subordinate to temperament.’ Therefore, according to Zola, a ‘work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.’ Vincent did not comment on this passage directly, but in his lines we see that in Zola’s words he found confirmation of his own beliefs. To Theo, in 1885, he wrote of his attempts to capture the effects of light in The Potato Eaters: “Not always literally exactly – rather never exactly – for one sees nature through one’s temperament.” The two contrasting souls that live side by side in the author of Les Rougon Macquart, one methodical, the other creative, reflected Vincent’s own creative approach.
Mariella Guzzoni in Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
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