Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 618
Lower Manhattan
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Today, instead of one voice, we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority – instead there is a score of would-be masters who would usurp their place. All are full of histories, statistics, proofs, demonstrations, facts, and quotations. First they read and exhort, and finally they resort to intimidation by threats and moral imprecations. Each pulls the artist this way and that, telling him what he must do if he is to fill his belly and save his soul.
Mark Rothko in The Artists’ Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 332
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers – perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translation by M.D. Herter Norton
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