Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 663
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
”No one has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and a making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.”
– Mary Oliver
…Mary Oliver was right. Masterpieces are not conceived at cocktail parties, clubs, or on crowded beaches. If you want to summon your muse and set the stage for astonishing things to happen, silence is the most essential prerequisite. It is where the real alchemy of art happens. You need to calm yourself in that fragile place that exists parallel to this one. When some intruder from the underworld of quotidian life smashes through, demanding our focus, all the glittering magic scatters, and flies away.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
A: I’m working on a 58” x 38” pastel painting that is number 20 in the ”Bolivianos” series. It does not yet have a title. The mask depicted is a Supay. From Wikipedia:
In the Quechua, Aymara, and Inca mythologies, Supay was both the god of death and ruler of the Ukha, Pacha, and the Incan underworld, as well as a race of demons. Supay is associated with miners’ rituals.
With the Spanish colonization of the Americas, Christian priests used the name “Supay” to refer to the Christian Devil. However, unlike Europeans in relation to the Christian Devil, the indigenous people did not repudiate Supay but, being scared of him, they invoked him and begged him not to harm them.
Supay acquired a syncretic symbolism, becoming a main character of the diabladas of Bolivia (seen in the Carnival of Oruro), Peru and other Andean countries. The name Supay is now roughly translated into diablo (Spanish for devil) in most Southern American countries. In some of them, for example the northern region of Argentina, the underworld where Supay rules, is called “Salamanca”.
Comments are welcome!
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