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Pearls from artists* # 61

White Sands, NM

White Sands, NM

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

I can only shudder when I think of life without our handiwork.  The sheer paucity of living only for the sake of survival and empty diversion would be that of an empty vessel.  My own life as an artist helps me to fill that vessel, and on occasion I am able to share that with another.  Is there meaning in my struggle, my endless solitude?  Yes, I believe there is, for at the very least I have found greater meaning for myself in that search.  And as those artists who have come before me have perhaps more clearly expressed, our ability to ponder the questions that denote our humanness are worthy of a life of solitude.  That is where I find my solace and my courage.  In the final analysis, it is the art that I make that allows me to pause and briefly see.  Only now do I begin to understand and accept both the burden and joy of my life.  

Dianne Albin quoted in Eric Maisel’s The Van Gogh Blues

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 49

Untitled, 24" x 24" chromogenic print, edition of 5

Untitled, 24″ x 24″ chromogenic print, edition of 5

* 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 beauty of art is better, “higher,” according to Hegel, than the beauty of nature because it is made by human beings and is the work of the spirit.  But the discerning of beauty in nature is also the result of traditions of consciousness, and of culture – in Hegel’s language, of spirit.

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent.  As Wilde pointed out, art does more than school us on how and what to appreciate in nature.  (He was thinking of poetry and painting.  Today the standards of beauty in nature are largely set by photography.)  What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

A happy by-product of this insight, if insight it is:  beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous.

Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”    

Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, editors, Susan Sontag At the Same Time:  Essays and Speeches  

Comments are welcome!