Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 725
New York sunset
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Mira Schor
To survive in the long run, to continue to function, someone ought to tell you that there is a long run. To survive, it is necessary to stand for something within yourself and always doubt your own deepest beliefs. It is necessary to have the agglomeration of terrors and hopes, delights and doubts that make up a soul. Perhaps a soul is culturally bound and determined, but it can be more than a slave to fashion. Trends are fleeting. A lifetime of art cannot be built on a weathervane.
Quoted in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career by Stuart Horodner
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Pearls from artists* # 724
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Hokusai
From the age of six, I had a passion for drawing the form of objects. By the age of about fifty, I had published an infinity of drawings, but nothing I produced before the age of seventy is worth counting. It was at the age of seventy-three that I more or less understood the structure of true nature, of animals, grasses, birds, fish, and insects.
Consequently, by the age of eighty, I will have made even more progress; at ninety I will penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I will definitely have reached a degree of wonder, and when I am a hundred and ten, for my part, be it a dot, be it a line, everything will be alive.
I ask those who will live as long as I do to see if I keep my word.
Written at the age of seventy-five by myself, formerly Hokusai, today Gwakio Rogin, the old man crazy about drawing.
Stuart Horodner in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 723
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Francis Bacon Interview with David Sylvester
DS: You really are not working with any thought of an audience?
FB: I’m working for myself; what else have I got to work for? How can I work for an audience? What do you imagine that an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anybody else likes my work sometimes. I suppose I’m very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try and do, if that’s what you call luck.
Stuart Horodner in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
Comments are welcome!
