Barbara’s Studio with work in progress

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

Falling in love with beauty or with someone else’s artwork that touches us is easy. We can experience the rapture of it and go home. But falling in love with our instrument or with our work is more like falling in love with a person, in that we experience the rapture and delight of the discovery, but then we are saddled with the effort of fulfillment, with love’s labors and the hard lessons in which illusions are stripped away, in which we confront difficult pieces of self-knowledge, in which we have to stretch our physical, emotional, intellectual stamina to its limits, in which our patience and our ability to persevere and transcend ourselves are tested.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!