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Pearls from artists* # 674
Southampton, New York Photo: Susan Erlichman
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Everything about art requires dedication and presence. It is an intimate act, demanding the kind of sustained devotion we rarely lavish on other human beings. The artist’s generosity is highly impractical because there is no guarantee that it will ever be appreciated. Consider the level of optimism needed to repeatedly spend, even deplete, whatever reserves might be required to create the most superlative gift you could offer, one that is essentially given away to the world for free. The work we make is a love letter in a bottle, thrown into the ocean. It may or may not be read. We do not negotiate. like businesspeople, ‘You give me this, and I will give you that…’ We bequeath our pursuit of excellence and creative spirit to our audience, without reservation or qualification. We know what we have invested in it and sleep better because of it.
– Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 672
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.
Beware of first impressions; try to have more presence of mind.
You should not be deceived by the eager promises of your best friends, by offers of help from influential people, or by the interest which men of talent seem to take in you, into thinking that there is anything real in what they say – real in the way of results, I mean. Many people are full of good intentions when they speak, but their eagerness subsides appreciably when it comes to action, like blusterers, or people who make angry scenes […]. And you, yourself, try to be more cautious in the way you welcome people, and above all, avoid these ridiculous attentions; they’re only offered on the impulse of the moment.
Cultivate a well-ordered mind, it’s your only road to happiness; and to reach it, be orderly in everything, even in the smallest details.
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington
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Pearls from artists* # 638
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 was in the presence of a woman [Grace Hartigan] who had sacrificed everything, including her only child, to be what she was: an artist. The rewards had been few, beyond a life well-lived (not materially, but spiritually) and the recognition in her waning years that she had been honest about who she was and what she needed. A rare accomplishment for a woman of any generation, it was particularly so of hers, when servitude to family was the only goal toward which a “healthy” woman was to aspire. Grace was living proof that, on the contrary, a life dreamed could be a life lived. All it took was courage, commitment, and humor. I remember both of us laughing a lot that afternoon. Though the subject was serious, the stories Grace told were fantastic and the woman who recounted them was as wild as the twenty-six-year-old who had abandoned everything in 1948 to paint, though she wasn’t even sure how.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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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!
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Pearls from artists* # 528
*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 so many good reasons to stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life.
First of all, it’s annoying. Every artist complains, so it’s a dead and boring topic. (From the volume of complaints that emerges from the professional creative class, you would think these people had been sentenced to their vocations by an evil dictator, rather than having chosen their line of work with a free will and open heart).
Second, of course it’s difficult to create things; if it wasn’t difficult, everyone would be doing it, and it wouldn’t be special or interesting.
Third, nobody ever really listens to anybody else’s complaints, anyhow, because we’re all too focused on our own holy struggle, so basically, you’re just talking to a brick wall.
Fourth, and most important, you’re scaring away inspiration. Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended. It’s almost like inspiration puts up its hands and says, “Hey, sorry buddy! I didn’t realize my presence was such a drag. I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative living Beyond Fear
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Pearls from artists* # 515
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
“Under [General Francisco] Franco,” he said, “attendance at Catholic holidays was obligatory and much Catalan folklore was banned. People avoided the religious processions and, once they were no longer mandatory, ignored them… Marvesa’s [Spain] festive license of demons and dragons is no longer of darkness. If Franco claimed the mantle of Catholic light, then to party as Catalan devils is a happy celebration of freedom.
Demons and dragons are a customary feature of saints’ days and Corpus-Christi festivals throughout Spain and its former empire. They are also common in Carnivals. Indeed, it is partly because of the presence of demons, dragons, and other masked transgressive figures that Carnival has been so often designated – by defenders and detractors alike – as a pagan or devilish season, a time of unrestrained indulgence before the ascetic penances of Lent.
Julio Caro Baroja, the father of Spanish Carnival studies, scorned the antiquarian notion that the masked figures and seasonal inversions of Carnival were “a mere survival” of ancient pagan rituals. Carnival, he argued, was first nurtured by the dualistic oppositions of Christianity. Where it survives – for when he wrote it had been banned by Franco – it still enacts these old antagonisms. “Carnival,” he concluded, “is the representation of paganism itself face-to-face with Christianity.”
... Peter Burke, one of the more lucid historians of popular culture, has proposed that “there is a sense in which every festival [in early modern Europe] was a miniature Carnival because it was an excuse for disorder and because it drew from the same repertoire of traditional forms.
Max Harris in Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance
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Pearls from artists* # 446
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What stops us in our tracks? I am rarely stopped by something or someone I can instantly know. In fact, I have always been attracted to the challenge of getting to know what I cannot instantly categorize or dismiss, whether an actor’s presence, a painting, a piece of music, or a personal relationship. It is the journey towards the object of attraction that interests me. We stand in relation to one another. We long for the relationship that will change our vistas. Attraction is an invitation to an evanescent journey, to a new way of experiencing life or perceiving reality.
An authentic work of art embodies intense energy. It demands response. You can either avoid it, shut it out, or meet it and tussle. It contains attractive and complicated energy fields and a logic all its own. It does not create desire or movement in the receiver, rather it engenders what James Joyce labelled ‘aesthetic interest.’ You are stopped in your tracks. You cannot easily walk by it and go on with your life. You find yourself in relation to something that you cannot readily dismiss.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
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Pearls from artists* # 416
“Acolytes,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* 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 young man was experiencing that profound emotion which has stirred the hearts of all great artists when, in the prime of youth and their love of art, they approach a man of genius or stand in the presence of a masterpiece. There is a first bloom in all human feelings, the result of a noble enthusiasm which gradually fades till happiness is no more than a memory, glory a lie. Among such fragile sentiments, none so resembles love as the youthful passion of an artist first suffering that initial delicious torture which will be his destiny of glory and woe, a passion brimming with boldness and fear, vague hopes and inevitable frustrations. The youth who, short of cash but long of talent, fails to tremble upon first encountering a master, must always lack at least one heartstring, some sensitivity in his brushstroke, a certain poetic expressiveness. There may be concerned boasters prematurely convinced that the future is theirs, but only fools believe them. In this regard, the young stranger seemed to possess true merit, if talent is to be measured by that initial shyness and that indefinable humility which a man destined for glory is likely to lose in the exercise of his art, as a pretty woman loses hers in the stratagems of coquetry. The habit of triumph diminishes doubt, and humility may be a kind of doubt.
Honore Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece
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Pearls from artists* # 407
“Survivors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″ image, 28 1/2″ x 35″ framed
* 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 the images [the paintings of the Chauvet cave in southern France] this prehistoric people have bequeathed to us, we get a glimpse of something like a shared humanity, but we also gaze into a stranger part of ourselves, something reaching to the depths. Since we do not know the context in which the paintings were made, we cannot in good faith chalk them up to some clear pragmatic end. We are seeing art in its naked state, deprived of any discernible appropriation. This can trouble our secular sensibilities since it confronts us not just with the mysteries of nature, but more strikingly still with the riddle of the presence of such things as us in the otherwise coherent physical world. Given the fact that the molecular chemistry that makes life possible is the same throughout the cosmos, would finding works of art on Mars or a remote planet be any more uncanny than finding them here on Earth?
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
Pearls from artists* # 529
Oct 19
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.
All sorts of novelists, composers, choreographers, poets, and painters find themselves engaged in the challenges of authority and freedom that are the lifeblood of the arts. Art is a way of life – and not only or even essentially for geniuses. An artistic community – to whatever degree it may be joined by social, economic, or other concerns – is fundamentally united by the imperatives of a vocation as they are shaped in a particular time. Genius doesn’t emerge ex nihilo. And it doesn’t have a unique relationship with authority and freedom. Whatever truth there is to Walter Benjamin’s comment, apropos of Proust’s novel, that certain masterpieces begin or end a genre, it’s usually true that every masterpiece reaffirms the fundamental character of a form. For every epochal achievement that we may see as an assertion of unexpected degrees of freedom (Beethoven’s final quartets or Shakespeare’s last plays), there are others that reaffirm the pressure of tradition (an example is Raphael’s neoclassical designs for tapestries representing scenes from the lives of Saint Peter and Saint Paul). For every creative spirit, the great as well as the merely good, there is a sense in which the wager is the same.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Posted in 2022, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Art Works in Progress, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Quotes
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