Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 430
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” 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.
In art there must be a governing thought expressed eloquently. We must have it in ourselves, and stamp upon others, just as a medal is stamped… Art is not a pleasure trip; it is a battle, a mill that grinds. I’m not a philosopher. I don’t want to stop pain, or find a formula that makes me indifferent or stoic. Pain is, perhaps, that which makes the artist express himself most distinctly.
Jean Francois Millet quoted by Mariella Guzzoni in Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
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Pearls from artists* # 391
“Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20,” packed up for transport to the framer
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Charles Baudelaire once wrote that the frenzy of the artist
is the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the phantom escape before the synthesis has been extracted and pinned down; it is that terrible fear which takes possession of all great artists and gives them such a passionate desire to become masters of every means of expression so that the orders of the brain may never be perverted by the hesitations of the hand and that finally… ideal execution, may become as unconscious and spontaneous as is digestion for a healthy man after dinner.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 387
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” 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.
You know, you don’t go into the studio and say, “Oh, here I am this marvelous heroine, this wonderful woman doing my marvelous painting so all these marvelous women artists can come after me and do their marvelous painting.” There you are alone in this huge space and you are not conscious of the fact that you have breasts and a vagina. You are inside yourself, looking at a damned piece of rag on the wall that you are supposed to make a world out of. That is all you are conscious of. I simply cannot believe that a man feels differently… Inside yourself, you are looking at this terrifying unknown and trying to feel, to pull everything you can out of all your experience, to make something. I think a woman or a man creating feels very much the same way. I bring my experience, which is different from a man’s, yes, and I put it where I can. But once that is done, I don’t know if it is a woman’s experience I’m looking at.
Grace Hartigan quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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