Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 591
![In the studio](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ffb5f221-33eb-4907-a5fa-b665cf76f738.jpeg?w=604)
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Like lîla, or divine creativity, art is a gift, coming from a place of joy, self-discovery, inner knowing. Play, intrinsically rewarding, doesn’t cost anything. As soon as you put a price on it, it becomes, to some extent, not play. Somewhere, therefore, we each have to map out for ourselves the tricky questions of money and the artist. This is a difficult issue because artists have to eat, equip themselves, and subsidize years of professional training. Yet the marketplace shifts our art at least to some degree out of the state of free play, and may in some cases contaminate it totally. Professional athletes face the same issues. Certainly they play to a great extent for love of their sport, but issues of money, prestige, and fame introduce a lot of non play as well.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 589
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/img_4040.jpeg?w=1024)
Barbara’s studio… where plenty of mistakes happen!
*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 school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don’t make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience cones from bad judgment.” But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.
Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable technique. But when a mistake occurs, we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 587
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/img_4409.jpeg?w=1024)
With friends of fifty years!
*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 general preparations include everything I do to be healthy and ready for surprises, with a full palette of resources available. I need energy to acquire skill, energy to practice, energy to keep going through the inevitable setbacks, energy to keep going when things look good and I am tempted to sit back and relax. I need physical energy, intellectual energy, libidinal energy, spiritual energy. The means to tapping these energies are well known: exercise the body, eat well, sleep well, keep track of dreams, meditate, enjoy the pleasures of life, read and experience widely. When blocked, tap into the block-busters: humor, friends, and nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 584
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/img_4130.jpeg?w=1024)
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.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
Carl Jung quoted by Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 581
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_1380.jpeg?w=1024)
With recent “Bolivianos”
*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 essence of style is this: We have something in us, about us; it can be called many things, but for now let’s call it our original nature. We are born with our original nature, but on top of that, as we grow up, we accommodate to the patterns and habits of our culture, family, physical environment, and the daily business of the life we have taken on. What we are taught solidifies as “reality.” Our persona, the mask we show the world, develops out of our experience and training, step by step from infancy to adulthood. We construct our world through the actions of perception, learning, and expectation. We construct our “self” through the same actions of perception, learning, and expectation. World and self interlock and match each other, step by step and shape by shape. If the two constructions, self and world, mesh, we grow from child to adult becoming “normally adjusted individuals.” If they do not mesh so well, we may experience feelings of inner division, loneliness, or alienation.
If we should happen to become artists, our work takes on, to a certain extent, the style of the time: the clothing in which we are dressed by our generation, our country and language, our surroundings, the people who have influenced us.
But somehow, even when we are grown up and “adjusted,” everything we do and are – our handwriting, the vibrato of our voice, the way we handle the bow or breathe into the instrument, our way of using language, the look in our eyes, the pattern of whirling fingerprints on our hand – all these things are symptomatic of our original nature. They all show the imprint of our own deeper style or character.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 579
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/img_3799.jpeg?w=768)
New York, NY
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
An empirical fact about our lives is that we do not and cannot know what will happen a day or a moment in advance. The unexpected awaits us at every turn and every breath. The future is a vast perpetually regenerated mystery and the more we live and know, the greater the mystery. When we drop the blinders of our preconceptions, we are virtually propelled by every circumstance into the present time and the present mind: the moment, the whole moment, and nothing but the moment. This is a state of mind taught and strengthened by improvisation, a state of mind in which the here and now is not some trendy idea but a matter of life and death, upon which we can learn to reliably depend. We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in general motion and a perpetual invitation to create.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 575
![](https://barbararachkoscoloreddust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/b8a96a18-3957-49c9-b21f-55d2cc64f1d6.jpeg?w=1024)
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.
Creativity is a harmony of opposite tensions… As we ride through the flux of our own creative processes, we hold onto both poles. If we let go of play, our work becomes ponderous and stiff. If we let go of the sacred, our work loses its connection to the ground on which we live.
Knowledge of the creative process cannot substitute for creativity, but it can save us from giving up on creativity when the challenges seem too intimidating and free play seems blocked. If we know that our inevitable setbacks and frustrations are phases of the natural cycle of creative processes, if we know that our obstacles can become our ornaments, we can persevere and bring our desires to fruition. Such perseverance can be a real test, but there are ways through, there are guideposts. And the struggle, which is guaranteed to take a lifetime, is worth it. It is a struggle that generates incredible pleasure and joy. Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of these imperfect attempts is an occasion for a delight unlike anything else on earth.
The creative path is a spiritual path. The adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!