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Q: Why do you sometimes depict the same subject matter twice?

“Trickster” (left) and “Sacrificial,” while the latter was in-progress
A: It is fascinating to play around with scale. For starters, it helps demonstrate how my pastel techniques and my approach to the subject matter are evolving. I’ve noticed that I always see and depict more details the second time around.
Typically, I prefer the second pastel painting over the first one depicting the same subject. Man Ray famously said:
“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.”
I disagree with him. I am an optimist who believes that artists cannot help but improve over time. It’s one of the things that gets me into my studio: the idea that my creative process and my ways of using pastel are changing for the better. I like to think this represents some sort of creative progress. But still I sometimes have to wonder, is the idea of ‘progress’ just something artists tell ourselves in order to keep going?
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Pearls from artists* # 540

*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 Wise Old Man or Woman is a figure found throughout folklore and mythology. They possess superior understanding and also often a more developed spiritual or moral character. Frequently, such characters provide the information or learning that the Hero needs to move forward in their quest. In “Star Wars,” Ben Kenobi plays the teacher to Luke, introducing purpose and knowledge into the young Hero’s life. Where the Hero brings a drive, courage, and direct action, the Wise Old One introduces the importance of the opposing values of thought and questioning. Jung describes it thus: ‘Often the old man in fairytales asks questions like who? Why? Whence? Wither? For the purpose of inducing self-reflection and mobilizing the moral force.’
The Wise One may appear in disguise to test the character of others. In the second “Star Wars” film, “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), Luke’s mentor Yoda does not reveal himself as such when they first meet. He waits, asking questions that test Luke’s motivation for being there. Jung associated the Trickster archetype with the Wise One, and the use of disguise emphasizes this correlation.
Gary Bobroff in Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell
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Pearls from artists* # 539

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It is important to consider, when cities like New York continue a process of gentrification that make them unlivable for most artists and intellectuals, that the community Schloss describes was to some extent brought into being by a number of radically different circumstances: first, immigration – in some cases, such as de Kooning, illegal, and in others, such as Schloss, forced by war and politics – and second, the existence in post-Great Depression New York of cheap rents for run-down spaces that no one other than artists would consider or would be able to make not just livable but eventually fashionable.
Mira Schor in The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly, Portraits and Sketches 1942-2011 edited by Mary Venturini
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Pearls from artists* # 521

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
But on the whole, I’m taking into consideration, at the point of the cut, where the audience’s eye is and what direction it’s moving, and with what speed. The editor has to imagine the audience’s point of attention when the film is projected, and has to be able to predict where ninety-nine percent of the audience is looking at any moment… I have to be able to say with some certainty that at such-and-such a moment ninety-nine percent of the audience will be looking at this point on the screen, and in the next second they will be looking here. That means that their eye is travelling, say, left to right, to the upper corner of the frame, at a certain speed. If I choose to cut at this point – at frame 17 – I know that at that moment their eye is right here, in the Cartesian grid of the screen.
That’s a very valuable piece of information. When I select the next shot, I choose a frame that has an interesting visual at exactly that point, where the audience’s eye is at the moment of the cut, to catch and redirect their attention somewhere else. Every shot has its own dynamic. One of the editor’s obligations is to carry, like a sacred vessel, the focus of attention of the audience and move it in interesting ways around the surface of the screen.
This is exactly what I do as I work to compose my pastel paintings! – BR
In The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
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Pearls from artists* # 455

*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 live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with [someone], and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
… Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Anaïs Nin in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 3: 1939-1944
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Pearls from artists* # 211
* 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 is an ancient view that beauty is the object of a sensory rather than an intellectual delight, and that the senses must always be involved in appreciating it. Hence, when the philosophy of art became conscious of itself at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it called itself ‘aesthetics,’ after the Greek aesthesis, sensation. When Kant wrote that the beautiful is that which pleases immediately, and without concepts, he was providing a rich philosophical embellishment to this tradition of thinking. Aquinas too seems to have endorsed the idea, defining the beautiful in the first part of the Summa as that which is pleasing to sight (pulchra sunt quae visa placent). However, he modifies this statement in the second part, writing that ‘the beautiful relates only to sight and hearing of all the senses, since these are the most cognitive (maxime cognoscitive) among them.’ And this suggests, not only that he did not confine the study of beauty to the sense of sight, but that he was less concerned with the sensory impact of the beautiful than with its intellectual significance – even if it is a significance that can be appreciated only through seeing or hearing.
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton
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Pearls from artists* # 181
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It takes courage to face the unfamiliar, to espouse the different; courage to fight one’s own prejudices only less than those of others. Was it not a little child who first dared call the emperor naked? It took great fortitude for Kepler to adhere to his new notion of infinity (as the second focus of a parabola), for, as he said, “The idea seems absurd, but I can find no flaw in it”; just as it did for Galileo to murmur among his inquisitors, “Yet the world does move.” Most of us will never achieve great imaginative insights; we might at least attempt to be tolerant of those offered by others.
The Biological Basis of Imagination by R.W. Gerard in The Creative Process edited by Brewster Ghiselin
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