Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 693
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Earlier I wrote that I as an artist must concern myself with painting and not waste energy on trying to decipher other people’s intentions or motives. I still believe this to be correct.
(My main purpose in life is to paint, this is my profession. I am most happy when I am alone in the studio working. The other problems of politics exist outside my studio.)
note: I am not sure of this. I am sure of one thing that I am most happy when I am alone working in the studio. The distance between art + politics is one of grey. I have thought of my involvement in art as being one of combat—the paintings are weapons designed to destroy oppressors i.e., the establishment. Art is none of This! Art is Art.
A painting does not represent anything but itself. It shouldn’t look like anything else or make for any allusions. A painting is a painting just as a Rose is a Rose! May God bless Gertrude Stein!
Jack Whitten Notes From the Woodshed
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Pearls from artists* # 662
“Harbinger,” 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.
The main thing is that you follow your work. Follow it as truthfully as you can. You know, even when you get into ditches and stuff like that, rather than holding an idea of what you want it to be, rather than trying to manipulate your life to be a particular way […] let your life just unfold itself.
Kiki Smith quoted in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice by Kate Kretz
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Pearls from artists* # 639
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.
… my deep and lifelong conviction [is] that the results of my work don’t have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work itself. That’s a hard enough job. I refuse to take on additional jobs, such as trying to police what anybody thinks about my work once it leaves my desk.
Also, I realized it would be unreasonable and immature of me to expect that I should be allowed to have a voice of expression, but other people should not. If I am allowed to speak my inner truth, then my critics are allowed to speak their inner truths, as well. Fair’s fair. If you dare to create something and put it out there, after all, then it may accidentally stir up a response. That’s the natural order of life: the eternal inhale and exhale of action and reaction. But you are definitely not in charge of the reaction – even when the reaction is bizarre.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
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Q: Many artists can’t bear to face a blank canvas. How do you feel about starting a new piece?
Starting a 26” x 20”pastel painting!
A: That’s an interesting question because I happen to be re-reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and this morning I saw this:
You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the school of architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.
I’ve never understood this fear of “the blank canvas” because I am always excited about beginning a new painting. When you think about it, artists can often say, “In the history of the planet no one has ever made what I am about to make!” Once again I am looking at something new on my easel, even if it is only a blank 26” x 20” piece of sandpaper clipped to a slightly larger piece of foam core.
Unlike artists who are paralyzed before “a blank canvas,” I am energized by the imagined possibilities of all that empty space! I spend three or four months on a pastel painting so this experience of looking at a blank piece of paper on my easel happens three or four times a year at most.
Excluding travel to remote places, which is essential to my work and endlessly fascinating, the first day I get to spend blocking in a new painting is the most exhilarating part of my whole creative process. It’s when I feel the freest! I select the pastel colors quickly, without thinking too much about them, first imagining them, then feeling, looking, and reacting intuitively, always correcting and trying to make the painting look better and better!
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Pearls from artists* # 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.
In dealing with unconscious mind, we’re dealing with an ocean full of rich, invisible life forms swimming underneath the surface. In creative work we’re trying to catch one of these fish; but we can’t kill the fish, we have to catch it in a way that brings it to life. In a sense we bring it amphibiously to the surface so it can walk around visibly; and people will recognize something familiar because they’ve got their own fish, who are cousins to your fish. Those fish, the unconscious thoughts, are not passively floating “down there;” they are moving, growing, and changing on their own, and our conscious mind is but an observer or interloper. That is why Jung calls the depths of the unconscious the “objective psyche.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 568
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Some people say they work best under pressure, but working under pressure is a bit of a fallacy. It’s not waiting till the last minute that gives you the good work; it’s the focus that’s required when you wait till the last minute that brings about the good work. So think of it this way: your focus is the center of your brilliance; why not avail yourself of that brilliance on a regular basis? Everyone has her own rhythm, but if you don’t like the fact that you procrastinate, one way to get out of it is to think what the alternative is. The alternative is, instead of trying to do a month’s work in a few intense days in the studio, to give yourself the pleasure of yourself in flow, in focus, on a regular basis.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts for Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
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Pearls from artists* # 520
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Ondaatje: Do you think success and failure can distort the lessons an artist is able to learn?
Murch: There’s that wonderful line of Rilke’s, “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.” Recognizing that all of our achievements are doomed, in one sense – the earth will be consumed by the sun in a billion years or so – but in another sense the purpose of our journey is to go farther each time. So you’re trying things out in every film you make, with the potential of failure. I think we’re always failing, in Rilke’s sense – we know there’s more potential that we haven’t realized. But because we’re trying, we develop more and more talent, or muscles, or strategies to improve, each time.
In The Conversation: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
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Pearls from artists* # 518
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
“It’s more than beauty that I feel in music – that I think musicians feel in music. What we know we feel we’d like to convey to the listener. We hope that this can be shared by all. I think, basically, that’s what it is we are trying to do. We never talked about just what we were trying to do. If you ask me that question, I might say this today and tomorrow say something entirely different, because there are many things to do in music.
“But, overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me – it’s just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music.”
John Coltrane in Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews
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Pearls from artists* # 514
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Basically I am trying not to stagnate. I go this way and I go that way and I don’t know where I’m going next. But if I should get stagnant, I’d lose my interest.
There are so many things to be considered when making music. The whole question of life itself; my life in which there are many things on which I don’t think I’ve reached a final conclusion; there are matters I don’t think I’ve covered completely, and all these things have to be covered before you make your music sound any way. You have to grow to know.
When I was younger, I didn’t think this would happen, but now I know that I’ve still got a long way to go. Maybe when I’m sixty I’ll be satisfied with what I’m doing, but I don’t know… I’m sure that later on my ideas will carry more conviction.
I know that I want to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need. Music that will uplift and make them happy – those are the qualities I’d like to produce.
Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, edited by Chris DeVito
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Pearls from artists* # 506
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Inspiration is allowed to do whatever it wants to, in fact, and it is never obliged to justify its motives to any of us. (As far as I’m concerned, we’re lucky that inspiration talks to us at all; it’s too much to ask that it also explain itself).
In the end, it’s all about violets trying to come to light.
Don’t fret about the irrationality and unpredictability of all this strangeness. Give in to it. Such is the bizarre, unearthly contract of creative living. There is no theft; there is no ownership; there is no tragedy; there is no problem. There is no time or space where inspiration comes from – and also no competition, no ego, no limitations. There is only the stubbornness of the idea itself, refusing to stop searching until it has found an equally stubborn collaborator. (Or multiple collaborators, as the case may be).
Work with that stubbornness.
Work with it as openly and trustingly and diligently as you can.
Work with all your heart, because – I promise – if you show up for your work day after day after day after day, you just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
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