Blog Archives

Pearls from artists* # 144

Barbara's studio

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.

Art and design are rule-based.  This flies in the face of everything that most people have been taught before, namely, that art and design are about freedom.  I remember reading a wonderful analogy about this concept many years ago in an out-of-print, early twentieth-century book on design.  The author asked us to imagine a flying kite – the quintessential emblem of unrestricted, spontaneity, soaring in the wind.  Keeping taught the line between you and the kite, however, is the source of that freedom.  Here’s another way of putting it:  “Creativity arises out of the tension between the rules and imagination.”

Leslie Hirst in The Art of Critical Making:  Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice, Rosanne Somerson and Mara L. Hermano, editors

Comments are welcome!    

Pearls from artists* # 143

"Intruder," soft pastel on sandpaper, 26" x 20"

“Intruder,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″

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

Artists and designers have the capacity to generate something from deep inside ourselves to live outside of ourselves.  By residing in the experiential and the physical, and by developing the “hands on” as a portal of intelligent learning, we confirm the mind as maker and making as a state of mindfulness.  We demonstrate how artists and designers are hosts for enduring creative discovery that is self-initiated and actively engaged.  In short, artists and designers manifest what has not existed previously – in many cases, what has never even been imagined.

Rosanne Somerson in The Art of Critical Making:  Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice, Rosanne Somerson and Mara L. Hermano, editors

Comments are welcome!

   

%d bloggers like this: