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Pearls from artists* # 374
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Finally, [John] Graham said, of all the arts, painting was the most difficult because one false move on a canvas could mean the difference between a great painting and a failure. A writer could always resurrect a word, but a line or a shape was so ephemeral that, once changed, it was almost always lost for good. “To create life one has to love. To create a great work of art one has to love truth with the passion of a maniac. If society does not perceive this love, perhaps humanity will.” …The artists… came away… feeling as though they were not aberrations but part of a long tradition of individuals who had ignored fashion to create culture.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 354
*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 earlier work had taught me that artistic activity is a form of reasoning, in which perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined. A person who paints, writes, composes, dances, I felt compelled to say, thinks with his senses. This union of perception and thought turned out to be not merely a specialty of the arts. A review of what is known about perception, and especially about sight, made me realize that the remarkable mechanisms by which the senses understand the environment are all but identical with the operations described by the psychology of thinking. Inversely, there was much evidence that truly productive thinking in whatever area of cognition takes place in the realm of imagery. This similarity of what the mind does in the arts and what it does elsewhere suggested taking a new look at the long-standing complaint about the isolation and neglect of the arts in society and education. Perhaps the real problem was more fundamental: a split between sense and thought, which caused various deficiency diseases in modern man.
Rudolph Arnheim in Visual Thinking
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Pearls from artists* # 284
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
So… to work. It is not a non sequitur. I shall never be one of those directly active (except as a teacher, occasionally), but now and then I am made aware that my work, odd though it seems, does help people. But it is only in these last years at Nelson that I have known that for sure.
May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman
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Pearls from artists* # 264
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Science brims with colorful personalities, but the most important thing about a scientific result is not the scientist who found it, but the result itself. Because that result is universal. In a sense, that result already exists. It is only found by the scientist. For me, this impersonal, disembodied character of science is both its great strength and its great weakness.
I couldn’t help comparing the situation to my other passion, the arts. In the arts, the individual is the essence. Individual expression is everything. You can separate Einstein from the equations of relativity, but you cannot separate Beethoven from the Moonlight Sonata. No one will ever write The Tempest except Shakespeare or The Trial except Kafka.
Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
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Pearls from artists* # 529
Oct 19
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
All sorts of novelists, composers, choreographers, poets, and painters find themselves engaged in the challenges of authority and freedom that are the lifeblood of the arts. Art is a way of life – and not only or even essentially for geniuses. An artistic community – to whatever degree it may be joined by social, economic, or other concerns – is fundamentally united by the imperatives of a vocation as they are shaped in a particular time. Genius doesn’t emerge ex nihilo. And it doesn’t have a unique relationship with authority and freedom. Whatever truth there is to Walter Benjamin’s comment, apropos of Proust’s novel, that certain masterpieces begin or end a genre, it’s usually true that every masterpiece reaffirms the fundamental character of a form. For every epochal achievement that we may see as an assertion of unexpected degrees of freedom (Beethoven’s final quartets or Shakespeare’s last plays), there are others that reaffirm the pressure of tradition (an example is Raphael’s neoclassical designs for tapestries representing scenes from the lives of Saint Peter and Saint Paul). For every creative spirit, the great as well as the merely good, there is a sense in which the wager is the same.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Posted in 2022, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Art Works in Progress, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Quotes
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