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.

I think there are two very interesting stages in creative work.  One is confusion and one is boredom.  They generally both mean that there’s a big fish swimming under the water.  As Rilke said, “Live the questions.”  And not judge that there’s something wrong about confusion, because the people who are working, say, on the cure for leprosy – they work for years and years in a state of confusion, and very often they don’t find the cure.  They find something completely different.  But they keep living the question.  Confusion is absolutely essential to the creative process.  If there was no confusion, why do it?  I always feel that all of us have questions we’re asking all our lives, for our work, and if we ever found the answer, we’d stop working.  We wouldn’t need to work anymore.

Boredom – if you’ve ever been in therapy, you’d know that when you start getting bored, that’s really important.  The therapist sits up; there’s something going on, because the wall that you come against – that’s where the real gold is.   It’s really precious.

Andre Gregory (from My Dinner with Andre) in Anne Bogart, Conversations with Anne:  Twenty-four Interviews      

Comments are welcome!