Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 678
Along the Seine, Paris, France
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When I was a bit weary, losing hope, I would go out and walk across Paris. Sometimes I would meet an art lover who would say a word to me, nothing binding for him, but all the same it would buck me up a bit. For example, he might say: “What are you up to? I’d love to see what you’ve done. I’ll come and see you on Thursday at eleven. I’d go home feeling like a new man; I’d tell my wife how enthusiastic I felt; but on Thursday at ten I’d get an express letter saying, “Dear friend, please excuse me, something has come up.” But that wouldn’t matter so much because I’d made a new start. The deal had fallen through, but it’d still helped because it had given me new momentum.
Chatting With Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut
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Q: Have you noticed any common characteristics among the people who collect your work?
“Poseur,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 70” x 50” framed
A: Yes! They are fascinating people living lives devoted to nonstop learning, adventurous travel, and other proactive pursuits. Collectors of my work typically range in age from 40 to around 80. They are college graduates with advanced degrees. Sometimes they don’t have kids, which is why they have disposable income and time to pursue their interests in art and culture.
When I meet them (presuming my work was sold through a gallery or other third party), we usually have much to talk about – art, art history, photography, cinema, film history, dance, drama, music, travel, archaeology, Mexico, Central and South America, Bali – the list goes on and on. With so much in common, we quickly become good friends!
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Pearls from artists* # 666
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done. Most of it is not fairy dust in the least.
But sometimes it is fairy dust. Sometimes when I’m in the midst of writing, I feel like I am suddenly walking on one of those moving sidewalks that you find in a big airport terminal; I still have a long slog to my gate. And my luggage is still heavy, but I can feel myself being gently propelled by some exterior force. Something is carrying me along – something powerful and generous – and that something is decidedly not me.
You may know this feeling. It’s the feeling you get when you’ve made something wonderful, or done something wonderful, and when you look back at it later, all you can say is: “I don’t even know where that came from.”
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
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Q: Is there anything you wish you could change about life as a visual artist?
Barbara’s Studio
A: While there is much to admire and maybe even envy about being an artist, it does have some downsides. Among these, for me, is that enormous amounts of solitude are required to create art. I wish this were not the case.
Our work is entirely unique and because it starts as an idea in our heads, we must work solo to bring it into the world. We spend our days pondering, looking, and reacting, rather than speaking to anyone. As typical workdays go, it is rather odd.
I sometimes envy filmmakers who require collaboration with a large team of experts in order to practice their art. They have fellow professionals with whom they can discuss their ideas and they can solicit advice on how to make improvements. Artists rarely have this luxury.
On the other hand, visual artists don’t have to wait for anyone else to do their jobs before we can get to work. We don’t have to deal with personality conflicts or other people’s agendas. Our individual creative process is generally free of obstacles created by others. When you really think about it, the only thing that is required of an artist is to go to the studio and get to work! We are free to make our own rules and our own schedules, and, creatively speaking, are largely responsible for our own advances and setbacks.
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Q: Would you speak more about being represented by Brewster Gallery in the late 1990s?
A: In 1996 I landed my first major New York gallery, Brewster Gallery. I was still living in Virginia and Mia Kim, the director, had accepted my work on the basis of unsolicited slides mailed to the gallery in July. The first time she saw my pastel paintings in person was when I delivered them for a solo exhibition in October.
Brewster represented Latin American masters such as Frida Kahlo, Francisco Zuniga, Diego Rivera, Francisco Toledo, and Rufino Tamayo. Mia Kim, the director, said that she sometimes had to defend her decision to represent me. Mia’s fabulous response was, “Barbara has the SOUL of a Latina!” My work at that time was heavily influenced by Mexican culture. Mia immediately understood what I was doing in my work. How thrilled and honored I was to be represented by a gallery where my fellow sole non-Latina was Leonora Carrington! Leonora came to my opening.
Those were wonderful days!
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Pearls from artists* # 647
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.
My life is a collage, with time cutting and rearranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting. I wonder if traditional perspective is a necessary discipline for the art student, for over the years my life has taken on its own pattern and formed its own rules, adapting events and chronology in the sifting process of memory. As a mature artist, I can take liberties with perspective. We are not made of straight lines. As Picabia said: ‘Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction.’
Eileen Agar in A Look at My Life
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Pearls from artists* # 640
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When an artist changes and develops over the years, as is natural to any creative person, such change is met by howls of protest from the marketers. Sometimes an artist (or teacher, scientist, or spiritual guru) starts with something extraordinary, becomes a star, and then their gift is either frozen or perverted.
The growing and risky edge of creative work is devalued, treated as a frill or extracurricular activity decorating the routine of ordinary life. There are few mechanisms available for the artist to construct a self-sustaining way of living and working. “One gathers,” says Virginia Woolf,
“from the enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a book of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally, material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poems in their misery dead” – that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
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Pearls from artists* # 634
St. Malo, Brittany, France
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Sometimes I think, “Well, why on Earth do I feel hopeful? Because the problems facing the planet are huge and if I analyze them carefully, they do sometimes seem impossible to solve. So why do I feel hopeful? Partly, because I’m obstinate. I just won’t give in. But it’s partly also because we cannot accurately predict what the future might bring. We simply can’t. No one can know how it will all turn out.
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams with Gail Hudson
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Q: How do you persist despite the haters, nay-sayers, etc.? (Question from Bold Journey Publishing)
Barbara’s Studio
A: There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? For artists I believe it’s all about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts, and a deep love of our hard-fought creative process.
I have been a full-time professional artist for 37 years. How and why do successful artists persist? It helps a lot to be stubborn! We just keep digging in that much deeper. Making art is a most noble and sacred calling – you know this if you are one of the called – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we artists who continue to struggle every day for recognition of our gifts are true heroes!
These words below by Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women, published in 2017, ring true for artists. It’s good, even for me, to occasionally reread them and be reminded.
The obstacles faced by women who hoped to leave a mark on humankind have, through the millennium, varied in height but not in stubborn persistence. And yet, a great many women have stubbornly ignored them. The desire to put words on a page or marks on a canvas was greater than the accrued social forces that told them they had no right to do so, that they were excluded by their gender from that priestly class called artist. The reason, according to Western tradition, was as old as creation itself: For many, God was the original artist and society had assigned its creator a gender – He. The woman who dared to declare herself an artist in defiance of centuries of such unwavering belief required monstrous strength, to fight not for equal recognition and reward but for something at once more basic and vital: her very life. Her art was her life. Without it, she was nothing. Having no faith that society would broaden its views on artists by dethroning men and accommodating women, in 1928 [Virginia] Woolf offered her fellow writers and painters a formula for survival that allowed them to create, if not with acceptance, then at least unimpeded. A woman artist, she said, needed but two possessions: “money and a room of her own.”
Furthermore, I think I persist because I do not believe in “big breaks.” Big breaks may sometimes happen, but in my experience an artist’s life is made up of single-minded dedication, persistence, hard work, and lots of small breaks. I recently finished reading “Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never stop Learning” by Leslie Odom, Jr. I like what he has to say to artists here:
The biggest break is the one you give yourself by choosing to believe in your wisdom, in what you love, and in the gifts you have to offer the waiting world.
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Pearls from artists* # 603
With friends in Alexandria, VA
*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 annals of art and science are full of studies of men and women who, desperately stuck on an enigma, have worked until they reached their wit’s end, and then suddenly made their longed-for creative leap of synthesis while doing errands or dreaming. The ripening takes place when their attention is directed elsewhere.
Insights and breakthroughs often come during periods of pause or refreshment after great labors. There is a prepatory period of accumulating data, followed by some essential but unforeseeable transformation. William James remarked in the same vein that we learn to swim in winter and skate in summer. We learn that which we do not concentrate on, the part that has been exercised and trained in the past but that is now lying fallow. Not doing can sometimes be more productive than doing.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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