Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 686
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
HM: I’ve never met many people; I’ve never much sought out older painters, first because I didn’t want to disturb them and then because what an artist says is so insignificant, I find, compared to what he does. The same phrases can so easily fit different things when you’re talking about the visual arts.
You can’t describe them. All you can do is create a kind of analogy using words. But even then the words have to reach the same part of the spectator that’s ready and waiting for them.
Henri Matisse in Chatting With Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbault
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Pearls from artists* # 635
Dinard, Brittany, France
*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 body of writing takes a thousand different forms,
and there is no right way to measure.
Changing, changing at the flick of a hand, its various
forms are difficult to capture.
Words and phrases compete with one another, but the
mind is still master.
Caught between the unborn and the living, the writer
struggles to maintain both depth and surface.
He may depart from the square, he may overstep the
circle, searching for the one true form of his reality.
He would fill the eyes of his readers with splendor, he
would sharpen the mind’s values.
The one whose language is muddled cannot do it;
only when mind is clear can language be noble.
Lu Chi quoted in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life by Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Pearls from artists* # 460
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Precious realm of painting! That silent power that speaks at first only to the eyes and then seizes and captivates every faculty of the soul! Here is your real spirit; here is your own true beauty, beautiful painting, so much insulted, so much misunderstood and delivered up to fools who exploit you. But there are still hearts ready to welcome you devoutly, souls who will no more be satisfied with mere phrases than with inventions and clever artifices. You have only to be seen in your masculine and simple vigor to give pleasure that is pure and absolute. I confess that I have worked logically, I, who have no love for logical painting. I see now that my turbulent mind needs activity, that it must break out and try a hundred different ways before reaching the goal towards which I am always straining. There is an old leaven working in me, some black depth that must be appeased. Unless I am writhing like a serpent in the coils of a pythoness I am cold. I must recognize this and accept it, and to do so is the greatest happiness. Everything good that I have ever done has come about in this way. No more ‘Don Quixotes’ and such unworthy things!
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
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