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Pearls from artists* # 556

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.

The painter Paul Klee exclaimed in his diary, “Am I God? I have accumulated so many great things in me!” But we also remember these other words of Klee… “He who strives will never enjoy this life peacefully.” The lucky artist may be the one who, while in human measure a god, has nevertheless found satisfactory ways of escaping the relentless firing of his synapses.

Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 126

Self-portrait with "Blue Misterioso"

Self-portrait with “Blue Misterioso”

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art.  There is no subject the photographer might attempt that could not be touched with pathos.  All photogrpahs are memento mori.  To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.  precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Photography by Susan Sontag in Anthology:  Selected Essays from Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books, edited by Robert S. Silvers and Barbara Epstein

Comments are welcome!

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