Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 125
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.
My own natural proclivity is to categorize the world around me, to remove unfamiliar objects from their dangerous perches by defining, compartmentalizing and labeling them. I want to know what things are and I want to know where they are and I want to control them. I want to remove the danger and replace it with the known. I want to feel safe. I want to feel out of danger.
And yet, as an artist, I know that I must welcome the strange and the unintelligible into my awareness and into my working process. Despite my propensity to own and control everything around me, my job is to “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar,” as Bertolt Brecht recommended: to un-define and un-tame what has been delineated by belief systems and conventions, and to welcome the discomfort of doubt and the unknown, aiming to make visible what has become invisible by habit.
Because life is filled with habit, because our natural desire is to make countless assumptions and treat our surroundings as familiar and unthreatening, we need art to wake us up. Art un-tames, reifies and wakes up the part of our lives that have been put to sleep and calcified by habit. The artist, or indeed anyone who wants to turn daily life into an adventure, must allow people, objects and places to be dangerous and freed from the definitions that they have accumulated over time.
Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling
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Q: How important is the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think about who will enjoy your Art when you conceive it?
Painting, subject, reference photo
A: I can’t say that I think at all about audience reaction while I’m creating a painting in my studio. Although, of course I want people to respond favorably to the work.
Generally, I’m thinking about technical problems – making something that is exciting to look at, well-composed, vibrant, up to my exacting standards, etc. When I finish a painting, it is the best thing I am capable of making at that moment in time.
I think about a painting and look at it for so long and with such intensity, that it could hardly have turned out any differently. There is an inevitability to the whole lengthy process that goes all the way back to when I first laid eyes on the folk art figures in a dusty shop in a third world country. Looking at a newly-finished painting on my easel I often think, “Of course! I was drawn to this figure so that it could serve this unique function in this painting.”
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Q: In the “Black Paintings” you create a deep intellectual interaction and communicate a wide variety of states of mind. I admit that certain “Black Paintings” unsettle me a bit. I see in this series an effective mix between anguish and happiness. Rather than simply describing something, these paintings pose a question and force us to contemplation. Can you talk about this aspect of your work?
“The Storyteller,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
A: I’m sure you and other viewers will see all kinds of states of mind, like anguish, happiness, and everything in between. I think that’s wonderful because it means my work is communicating a message to you. Sometimes people have told me that my images are unsettling and that’s fine, too. I would never presume to tell anyone what to think about my work. As one reviewer put it, “What you bring to my work you get back in spades!”
Some of this is intentional, but some is not. My day-to-day experiences – what I’m thinking about, what I’m feeling, what I’m reading, the music I’m listening to, etc. – get embedded into the work. I don’t understand exactly how that happens, but I am glad it happens. This work does come from a deep place, much deeper than I am able to explain even to myself. After nearly three decades as an artist, the intricacies of my creative process are still a mystery. Personally, I am very fond of mysteries and don’t need to understand it all.
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Pearls from artists* # 122
Sanur, Bali
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Most significant growth in my life has been the direct result of errors, mistakes, accidents, faulty assumptions and wrong moves. I have generally learned more from my mistakes and my so-called failures than any successes or instances of “being right.” I would venture to propose that this equation is also true in the world at large. Error is a powerful animating ingredient in political, scientific and historical evolution as well as in art and mythology. Error is a necessity. The question I had to ask myself was: how can I cultivate a tolerance and an appetite for being wrong, for error?
In the face of an exceedingly complicated world, there are too many people who are invested in “being right.” These people are dangerous. Their authority is based on their sense of certainty. But innovation and invention do not only happen with smart people who have all of the answers. Innovation results from trial and error. The task is to make good mistakes, good errors, in the right direction.
There are many reasons that we get things as wrong as often as we do. Failures of perception, the cause of most error, are far more common in our daily lives than we like to think. We make errors because of inattention, because of poor preparation and because of haste. We err as a result of hardened prejudices about how things are. We err because we neglect to think things through. Our senses betray us constantly. But the chaos caused by being wrong also awakens energy and consciousness in us. In the moments that we realize our faults of perception, we are jerked into an awareness of our humanity. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek wrote, “Consciousness originates with something going terribly wrong.”
Anne Bogart in “What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling
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Pearls from artists* # 121
Sri Lanka
* 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, when they are absorbed in their work, are also deeply connected to other human beings. The theologian Matthew Fox said, “The journey the artist makes in turning inward to listen and to trust his or her images is a communal journey.” The psychologist Otto Rank argued that, “The collective unconscious, not rugged individuality, gives birth to creativity.”
To be sure, artists are not making real contact with real human beings as they work in the studio, but they are making contact in the realm of the spirit. The absence of the pressures real people bring to bear on them allows them, in solitude, to love humankind. Whereas in their day job they may hate their boss and at Thanksgiving they must deal with their alcoholic parents, in the studio their best impulses and most noble sentiments are free to emerge.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts
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Q: What in your opinion marks a work of art as contemporary?
West 26th Street, NYC
A: “Contemporary art” is defined formally as art made since 1970 by living artists who are still making new work. People often confuse the term “contemporary art” with “modern art,” but they are not the same. “Modern art” refers to art made during the period between, roughly, the 1860’s to 1970.
Nowadays there are so many different kinds of art – new forms are developing all the time – and almost anything can be considered contemporary art as long as someone, an artist, says it is art. Ours is a fascinating, but bewildering, crazy, and often silly art world. Since I am based in New York, I see a lot that makes me ask, “Is this really art?” and “Why would anyone make such a thing?”
If there is one single element I look for in visual art it would have to be a high degree of craft. I enjoy seeing work that is beautiful, well-crafted, and that makes me wonder how the artist made it. With the exception of Ai Weiwei and Julie Mehretu (maybe others I can’t think of just now), I prefer art made by a single creator, as opposed to artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, who employ dozens of people to make their work.
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Pearls from artists* # 108
At work on a pastel painting
* 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 generally need privacy in order to create, and as I’ve noted, what constitutes adequate privacy varies by person and time. Solitude quickly becomes isolation when it oversteps one’s desires. But most artists need to feel that they and their work won’t be examined prematurely and, certainly, won’t be ambushed unfinished by ridiculing eyes. You might go out and invite various people to critique a piece in progress, even knowing they’re unlikely to view it with sympathy, exactly because you feel there’s necessary information in their opinion. But, if you’ve invited them, however unpleasant the response, your experience is likely preferable to what you would feel if they impulsively offered up the same critiques unsolicited.
Someone making art needs privacy in part because the process of creation makes many people feel vulnerable, sometimes exquisitely so, particularly since the work frequently emerges in a jumble of mixed-up small parts that you can only assemble gradually, or in a wet lumpy mound that requires patient sculpting. When people feel prematurely revealed or exposed, they often experience great discomfort and find themselves babbling apologetically, seeking to reassure by laying out the distance they have yet to travel. It is in part this babble-as-smoke-screen to cover exposure resulting, distracting, unhappy self-consciousness that privacy seeks to shelter.
But even more significantly, privacy grants us permission to turn our attention inward without interruption. As I described earlier, in order to concentrate, think, and fantasize, we need to feel we’re in a safe enough space that we can lower our vigilance, stop monitoring our environment, and allow ourselves to refocus on the happenings within our own minds. There are times interruptions feel merciful, but many more when they disrupt our effort to flesh out an inchoate notion.
Janna Malamud Smith in an absorbing errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery
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Pearls from artists* # 105
“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.
Serendipitously, I read two memoirs in close proximity, Julia Child’s account of her life in France and how she learned to be a first-rate cook, and Renee Fleming’s story of becoming a world-class opera diva. While there were many differences between the women and the skills they set out to master, I was struck in both books by how extraordinarily hard each one worked in private for years and years before going public, certainly before becoming famous, and how each managed shame. Both women loved what they did and thus brought to bear a similar, and I suspect key, willingness to stay with their efforts through eons of study, practice, and improvement. Both had the ability to hear criticism and to make corrections repeatedly without becoming terminally discouraged; to bear the anxiety of their efforts; neither was too proud to learn and keep learning. This willingness to be taught and corrected, without feeling ashamed, sometimes over and over again, is a huge asset when you are seeking to do something very well. And one way shame impedes people is by making them take criticism too personally – as about them rather than about what they’re trying to learn.
Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery
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Pearls from artists* # 104
View of Roden Crater
* 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 the art historian Jack Flam has noted: ‘Art constantly reinvents itself. As time passes, new audiences find new ideas and inspiration in it and keep reframing its meanings and significance in fresh ways. Art also encourages new mental attitudes and ways of looking as it travels across space; some of these attitudes and beliefs might have been inconceivable to the people who created it, but the art nonetheless manages to speak persuasively and to create fresh images in other collective imaginations.’
Quoted in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens by Wendy A. Grossman
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Pearls from artists* # 103
Quemado, NM
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
There are times when the art-maker’s solitude feels mildly pleasant, or deeply pleasurable, or even blissful. Many people refer to Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” as their experience of art-making – that state of being in which one is focused and concentrated, removed from time, energized, and not lonely at all. But flow happens most readily when the task is not too frustrating, and when the obstacles feel manageable. I feel flow more readily when the writing is going well than when I’m trying to wrangle with some thorny bit of it. Then I feel unflow and, sometimes, too alone with the labor and very glad to have fond people close at hand in my life and in my memory.
Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery
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