Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 489
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Murch: …The only time one is able to exercise control over the film is in the editing. The images themselves are not sufficient. They’re very important, but they’re only images. What’s essential is the duration of each image: the whole eloquence of cinema is that it’s achieved in the editing room.
In The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
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Pearls from artists* # 481
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists, because they spend such prolonged periods in isolation, frequently fall behind the times. They may gain great self-knowledge, spiritual insight, and understanding of their media as they work in private, but at the price of a lack of vital knowledge of the world around them.
Because solitude provides artists with a safe haven, fits their personality, and offers them a kind of communal contact with other human beings through their work, it can also serve as a breeding ground for stagnation. Without ever realizing it, artists can grow flacid in isolation and begin to experience their solitude as deadening. The studio can become too easy and unchallenging a place.
The world outside the studio offers unmatched opportunities for growth and for the expression of authentic and courageous behavior. Artists often miss these opportunities and, remaining relatively untested, handle themselves poorly when they do venture out.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Pearls from artists* # 468
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Why does art elicit such different reactions from us? How can a work that bowls one person over leave another cold? Doesn’t the variability of the aesthetic feeling support the view that art is culturally determined and relative? Maybe not, if we consider the possibility that the artistic experience depends not on some subjective mood but on an individually acquired (hence variable) power to be affected by art, a capacity developed through one’s culture in tandem with one’s unique character. For evidence of this we can point to works that seem to ignore cultural boundaries altogether, affecting people of different backgrounds in comparable ways even though a specific articulation of their personal responses continues to vary. Consider the plays of William Shakespeare or Greek theater, or the fairy tales that have sprung up in similar forms on every continent. We could not be further removed from the people who painted in the Chauvet Cave, nor could we be more oblivious as to the significance they ascribed to their pictures. Yet their work affects us across the millennia. Everyone responds to them differently, of course, and the spirit in which people are likely to receive them now probably differs significantly from how it was at the beginning. But these permutations revolve around a solid core, something present in the images themselves.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 451
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Your attitude towards resistance determines the success of your work and your future. Resistance should be cultivated. How you meet these obstacles that present themselves in the light of any endeavor determine the direction of your life and career.
Allow me to propose a few suggestions about how to handle the natural resistances that your circumstances might offer. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Work with what you have right now. Work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not what for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait till you are sure you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circumstances will determine the quality of your future endeavors.
And, at the same time, be patient.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
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Pearls from artists* # 364
“White Star,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If we are left unmoved by a painting of the Virgin, it is likely because the artist was unmoved in the painting of her. The subject matter is mostly irrelevant; it is important only as a vehicle for the artist’s attention. Authenticity comes from how deeply the artist felt. And this is the key to how much silence, how much consciousness or attention, the art contains.
… subject matter, if the artist is even using it, is just an armature for the artist to engage his intensity of feeling. It is the quality of your attention that influences how you see and how deeply you feel. Different artists have affinities for different subject matter as a way into expressing themselves deeply. And that depth is the quality, we, the viewers, respond to. It is what we continue to respond to over the centuries in great works of art. The fact that things last, that we continue to admire them, is in the end a good indicator of their quality, of their silence. Art museums therefore, have little nodes of silence nestling in their galleries. They are filled with, to use André Malraux’s expression, “the voices of silence.”
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 351
Barbara at work on “The Orator”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
That art is apolitical does not mean that artists themselves can be excused from the political responsibilities that fall on others. It means rather that as a manifestation of eternal psychic force, each work of art goes farther and deeper than the limited perspective of any individual mind, including that of its author.
No artist can predict how his work will affect the world… The artist invests his entire personality into the work, but he does so as a means of expressing a vision that is transpersonal. Everything that makes him what he is informs the work, but the final result transcends all personal contingencies.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 340
Lower Manhattan
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What, do you suppose, are the lives of those who raise themselves above the level of the common herd? A continual struggle. A writer, for instance, must struggle against the laziness which he shares with the ordinary man when it comes to writing, because his genius demands to be heard, it is not merely of an empty desire for fame that he obeys, it is a matter of conscience. Let those who work coldly and calmly keep silence, for they have no conception of what it means to work under the spur of inspiration – the dread, the terror of rousing the sleeping lion whose roaring moves us to the very depth of our being. To sum up: be strong, simple, and true; here is an aim for every moment of the day, and it is always useful.
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
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Pearls from artists* # 203
“Palaver,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
One day, looking for something that might interest those few buyers there were, Marquet and I decided to reconnoiter. So we went to the Pavillon de Rohan, to the Galeries de Rivoli, where there were dealers in engraving and in all kinds of curiosities that might attract foreign customers. We each came back with an idea: mine was to do a park landscape with swans. I went to the Bois de Boulogne to do a study of the lake. Then I went to buy a photo showing swans and tried to combine the two. Only it was very bad; I didn’t like it – in fact nobody liked it; it was impossible; it was stodgy. I couldn’t change; I couldn’t counterfeit the frame of mind of the customers on the rue de Rivoli or anywhere else. So I put my foot through it.
I understood then that I had no business painting to please other people; it wasn’t possible. Either way, when I started a canvas, I painted it the way I wanted with things that interested me. I knew very well that it wouldn’t sell, and I kept putting off the confection of a picture that would sell. And then the same thing would happen the next time.
There are plenty of artists who think it’s smart to make paintings to sell. Then – when they have acquired a certain reputation, a degree of independence – they want to paint things for themselves. But that simply isn’t possible. Painting’s an uphill task and if you want to find out what you’re capable of, you can’t dillydally on the way.
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut, translated by Chris Miller
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Pearls from artists* # 170
Barbara at work, Photo: Marianne Barcellona
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkner’s technique is certainly the best one with which to produce Faulkner’s world, and Kafka’s nightmare has produced its own myths that make it communicable. Benjamin Constant, Stendahl, Eugene Fromentin, Jaques Riviere, Radiquet, all used different techniques, took different liberties, and set themselves different tasks. The work of art itself, whether its title is Adolphe, Lucien Leuwen, Dominique, Le Diable au corps or A la Recherché du temps perdu, is the solution to the problem of technique.
Francois Mauriac in The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work 1st Series, edited and with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley
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