Blog Archives
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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Pearls from artists* # 606
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 most ephemeral thoughts and feelings are gradually shaped into hard copy that is worked over, painted over, edited, and refined before the public sees it. This is where the sculptor cuts away and polishes the stone, where the painter covers the beginnings of the image with layer upon layer of enriching re-vision.
The muse presents raw bursts of inspiration, flashes, and improvisatory moments in which the art just flows out. But she also presents the technical, organizational job of taking what we have generated, then filing and fitting and playing with the pieces until they line up. We arrange them, cook them, render them down, digest them. We add, subtract, reframe, shift, break apart, melt together. The play of revision and editing transforms the raw into the cooked. This is a whole art unto itself, of vision and revision, playing with the half-baked products of our prior play.
It is essential to perform that secretarial labor in a way that is not mechanical. Editing must come from the same inspired joy and abandon as free improvisation. Stravinsky tells us, “The idea of work to be done is for me so closely bound up with the idea of the arranging of materials and of the pleasures of the actual doing of the work affords us that, should the impossible happen and my work suddenly be given to me in a perfectly completed form, I should be embarrassed and nonplussed by it, as a hoax.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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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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Pearls from artists* # 523
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
How strange the human mind is! When I first began, I think I should have been willing to work at it from the top of a church steeple, whereas now, even to think of finishing requires a real effort. And all this, simply because I have been away from it for so long. It is the same with my picture and with everything else I do. There is always a thick crust to be broken before I can give my whole heart to anything; a stubborn piece of ground, as it were, that resists the attack of plough and hoe. But with a little perseverance the hardness suddenly gives and it becomes so rich in fruit and flowers that I am quite unable to gather them all.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
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Pearls from artists* # 337
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.
I think society did a great disservice to artists when we started saying they were geniuses, instead of saying they had geniuses. That happened around the Renaissance, with the rise of a more rational and human-centered view of life. The gods and the mysteries fell away, and suddenly we put all credit and blame for creativity on the artists themselves – making the all-too-fragile humans completely responsible for the vagaries of inspiration.
In the process, we also venerated art and artists beyond their appropriate stations. The distinction of “being a genius” (and the rewards and status often associated with it) elevated creators into something like a priestly cast – and perhaps even into minor deities – which I think is a bit too much pressure for mere mortals, no matter how talented. That’s when artists start to really crack, driven mad and broken in half by the weight and weirdness of their gifts.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 168
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.
How strange the human mind is! When I first began, I think I should have been willing to work at it from the tops of a church steeple, whereas now, even to think of finishing requires a real effort. And all this, simply because I have been away from it for so long. It is the same with my picture and with everything else I do. There is always a thick crust to be broken before I can give my whole heart to anything; a stubborn piece of ground, as it were, that resists the attacks of plough and hoe. But with a little perseverance the hardness suddenly gives and it becomes so rich in fruit and flowers that I am quite unable to gather them all.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 111
Perkins Center for the Arts, Collingswood, NJ
It is very difficult to describe the creative experience in such a way that it would cover all cases. One of the essentials is the variety with which one approaches any kind of artistic creation. It doesn’t start in any one particular way and it is not always easy to say what gets you going.
I’ve sometimes made the analogy with eating. Why do you eat? You’re hungry. You are sort of in the mood to eat, and if you are in the mood to eat, the food tastes better; you’re more interested in what you’re eating. The whole experience is more “creative.” It’s the hunger that stimulates you to eat. It’s the same thing in art; except that, in art, the hunger is the need for self-expression.
How does it come about that you feel hungry? You don’t know, you just feel hungry. The juices are working, and suddenly you are aware of the fact that you want a piece of bread and butter. It’s about the same in art. If you pass your life in creating works of art in one field or another, you recognize the “hunger” signs and you are quick to take advantage of them, if they’re accompanied by ideas. Sometimes, you have the hunger and you don’t have any ideas; there’s no bread in the house. It’s as simple as that.
AAron Copland in The Creative Experience: Why and How Do We Create?, Stanley Rosner and Lawrence E. Abt, editors
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Pearls from artists* # 82
“The Sovereign,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Art isn’t psychology. For one thing art deals in images, not language. Images precede language and are closer to feelings. They summon feelings before they’re named and categorized, when they’re still fresh and sometimes hard to recognize or identify.
For another thing, to translate his vision an artist uses materials that are, for lack of a better word, alchemical. Paint, for example, has this wonderful, mysterious quality – a smell and a sensuous, velvety feel and an ability to hold color and light – that unlocks and speeds up one’s creative metabolism. And paint captures my every impulse – from my broadest conceptions to the tiniest ticks and tremors of my wrist.
There are literally no words to describe what occurs when an image suddenly and unexpectedly appears on the canvas. Sometimes it’s serendipity, the result of a fortunate brushstroke. Sometimes I think it has to do with the inherent qualities of paint, or the slickness of a surface, or the fullness or acuity of a brush. And sometimes when I’ve got a good rhythm going and everything comes together, I feel as though it produces the purest expression of who I am and what I am and how I perceive the world.
Eric Fischl and Michael Stone in Bad Boy: My Life on and off the Canvas
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