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Pearls from artists* # 589
Barbara’s studio… where plenty of mistakes happen!
*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 school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don’t make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience cones from bad judgment.” But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.
Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable technique. But when a mistake occurs, we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 108
At work on a pastel painting
* 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 generally need privacy in order to create, and as I’ve noted, what constitutes adequate privacy varies by person and time. Solitude quickly becomes isolation when it oversteps one’s desires. But most artists need to feel that they and their work won’t be examined prematurely and, certainly, won’t be ambushed unfinished by ridiculing eyes. You might go out and invite various people to critique a piece in progress, even knowing they’re unlikely to view it with sympathy, exactly because you feel there’s necessary information in their opinion. But, if you’ve invited them, however unpleasant the response, your experience is likely preferable to what you would feel if they impulsively offered up the same critiques unsolicited.
Someone making art needs privacy in part because the process of creation makes many people feel vulnerable, sometimes exquisitely so, particularly since the work frequently emerges in a jumble of mixed-up small parts that you can only assemble gradually, or in a wet lumpy mound that requires patient sculpting. When people feel prematurely revealed or exposed, they often experience great discomfort and find themselves babbling apologetically, seeking to reassure by laying out the distance they have yet to travel. It is in part this babble-as-smoke-screen to cover exposure resulting, distracting, unhappy self-consciousness that privacy seeks to shelter.
But even more significantly, privacy grants us permission to turn our attention inward without interruption. As I described earlier, in order to concentrate, think, and fantasize, we need to feel we’re in a safe enough space that we can lower our vigilance, stop monitoring our environment, and allow ourselves to refocus on the happenings within our own minds. There are times interruptions feel merciful, but many more when they disrupt our effort to flesh out an inchoate notion.
Janna Malamud Smith in an absorbing errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery
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Pearls from artists* # 102
New York, NY
* 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 a photograph is unlikely to be a laboratory record is evident when we think about how it is made. Most photographers are people of immense enthusiasms whose work involves many choices – to brake the car, grab the yellow instead of the green filter, wait out the cloud, and at the second everything looks inexplicably right, to release the shutter. Behind these decisions stands the photographer’s individual framework of recollections and meditations about the way he perceived that place or places like it before. Without such a background there would be no knowing whether the scene on the ground glass was characteristic of the geography and of his experience of it and intuition of it – in short, whether it was true.
Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive. Only the artist’s presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience. Without the photographer in the photograph the view is no more compelling than the product of some annoying record camera, a machine perhaps capable of happy accident but not response to form.
Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams
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