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Q: You started the Bolivianos series in 2017. It has been 8 years since you created The Champ. This endeavor of focussing on a series for almost a decade’s timeline shows that you embody stability as against many artists who tend to hop on to the next inspiration they find. How has discipline, stability, focus and punctuality defined your works apart from being inspired by Bolivian culture for the series Bolivianos? (Question from Vedica Art Studios and Gallery)
A: My first series, Domestic Threats, lasted fifteen years, and my second, Black Paintings, lasted ten. Stability and related qualities are likely natural parts of my personality, reinforced by my previous professional life. My prior careers as a Navy Commander, commercial pilot, and Boeing-727 Flight Engineer undoubtedly helped develop discipline, stability, focus, and punctuality. Details matter deeply to me; as a Naval Officer for twenty-one years, “attention to detail” was paramount. From my earliest days as an artist, I have been meticulous and dedicated to inventing new techniques and refining the craft of soft pastel.
I dislike wasting precious time. As a goal-oriented person, I continually strive to accomplish as much as possible. These qualities were influenced by my Navy career and further deepened by the tragic loss of my husband onboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. I understand firsthand that life can change in an instant. Whenever I finish one task, I immediately look around and ask, “OK, what’s next?” I devote my studio time to pushing myself and pastel to new technical heights. There’s always more to accomplish as an artist!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 651
*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 are engaged in a mission that can be perplexing to those around us. We are playing a long game that no one else can see. Every time we walk into the studio, it is a mini act of defiance against all of those who believe we are wasting our time. If you do not shore up and internalize this right to make art until it becomes a part of you, outside forces will repeatedly rise up to challenge it, creating conflict. Understand deep in your being that making art is a vital part of who you are, to be your own strongest advocate. Be greedy for the time and space your work requires to be actualized.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 599
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Leonora [Carrington] certainly became knowledgeable about Mexican muralism and in the early 1960s she would paint her own mural, el mundo mágico de Los mayas, but she was clear that this didn’t involve associating herself with the Mexican school [of muralists]. ‘I was not interested in a social message in painting and my mural was totally foreign to that discourse,’ she explained. Explanations were not something she gave often; she was always very clear that for her, elucidation was neither necessary nor possible, because she believed that art spoke to people in the deepest part of their psyche. She warned me not to try to rationalize or intellectualize it. The way to understand paintings, she said, was to tune in to one’s own feelings about a work: ‘You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make into a kind of mini-logic – you’ll never understand by that road.’
Joanna Moorhead in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
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Pearls from artists* # 64
High Line, 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.
As soon as an artist has located the vital center of his activities, nothing will be more important than for him to remain within this center and never move further away from it (which is, of course, also the center of his nature, of his world) than the interior walls of his quietly and steadily expanding achievement. His place is not, never, not even for a moment, next to the beholder and critic (at least no longer in an environment where all that is visible becomes ambiguous and preliminary, an auxiliary construction and temporary scaffolding for something else). And one basically needs to be an acrobat to leap back safely and unharmed from this point of view into one’s inner center (the distances are too great and all the spots too destabilized to risk such an entirely inquisitive feat). Most artists today use up their strength in this back-and-forth, and in addition to wasting their energy they get terribly confused and lose a part of their essential innocence to the sin of having taken their work from the outside by surprise, to have tasted it, to have joined others in enjoying it!
Ulrich Baer, editor, The Wisdom of Rilke
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